[Rt4-whois] Offline comments on WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report

[Smith, Bill]

I respect Mr Sullivan's opinions, and his statements regarding "factual" errors or inaccuracies may be correct, from a purely technical perspective. However, our audience is considerably broader.

I'm all for accuracy, but we also need to consider readability and the scope of our work - WHOIS for names.

On Mar 15, 2012, at 3:44 PM, Olof Nordling wrote:

> Dear Review Team Members,
> Please find some offline comments to the report, received today, for your attention and considerations.
> Very best regards
> Olof
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Sullivan [mailto:ajs at crankycanuck.ca] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 4:38 PM
> To: Olof Nordling
> Subject: Offline comments on WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report
> 
> Dear Mr Nordling,
> 
> In my public posting commenting on the recent WHOIS review team report, I mentioned that I found some nits.  I'm sending them to you as the staff support for the team.  These are some (occasionally very
> serious) technical errors that I found while reading the Whois Policy Review Team report.  I didn't include them in my public posting because I thought they might distract from the more substantive issues I wanted to focus on there.  But I urge the team to fix these errors; they seriously undermine the credibility of the report.  Please feel free to share this mail as widely as you wish.
> 
>    - The description of domain names in the Executive Summary is
>    either completely wrong, or a mistaken and misleading attempt to
>    gloss over complexities about the DNS name space. This might not
>    matter except that, if people are to take seriously proposals for
>    better management of domain name registration data, the details of
>    what a domain name is really need to be correct.  Rather than
>    fixing this, the entire passage might be removed without any harm:
>    someone who cannot already recognize a DNS name will probably not
>    care about WHOIS at all.
> 
>    - The introduction of WHOIS at the end of section B seems to
>    suggest that WHOIS is for domain name registration data; but the
>    WHOIS protocol has also historically been used for number
>    resources (as Appendix G states), and that history may be part of
>    the reason why the protocol has some of the limitations it has.
>    This could be fixed with a minor adjustment to the description.
> 
>    - The mention of alternatives to the WHOIS protocol in Chapter 5
>    (footnote 17, page 44) talks about CRISP.  But CRISP is not a
>    protocol, and RFC 3707 is in fact a requirements document -- one
>    that, if its specification were met, would address many of the
>    issues with the WHOIS protocol and permit a better service.  The
>    IRIS protocol (RFC 3982) was the development that followed from
>    the CRISP requirements.  The narrow issue could be fixed by
>    altering the reference.  (At a more substantive level, IRIS was
>    what resulted the last time the Internet community determined that
>    WHOIS was not the answer to registration data problems, and the
>    report might be stronger if it explored why those previous
>    attempts to replace WHOIS did not succeed.)  
> 
> In Appendix G:
> 
>    - The example IP address is not in any normal presentation format
>    for IP addresses, and it is very hard to see how it could be an IP
>    address in any of the more obscure ways of writing IP addresses.
> 
>    - DNS is not only used to translate names to numbers.
> 
>    - The entire discussion of whois lookup in a thin-registry context
>    ignores the way whois referral works, and appears to suggest that
>    people who do not know how to operate the tool ought to be able to
>    operate it without learning how.
> 
> In Appendix H:
> 
>    - The definitions of A-label and LDH-label most certainly do not
>    overlap.  
> 
>    - WHOIS was not originally specified in RFC 954, but in RFC 812,
>    published in 1982.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Andrew
> 
> --
> Andrew Sullivan
> ajs at crankycanuck.ca
> 
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