[Rt4-whois] Questions on Recommendation 17

[Lutz Donnerhacke]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 01:59:05PM -0500, Kathy Kleiman wrote:
> I understand it, we are recommending a "dedicated, multilingual website" to 
> provide thick Whois data (for thin gTLD registries, in one variation, and 
> all gTLD registries in the other):


No, we are recommending a "dedicated, multilingual website" to provide a
"centralized access to all whois data regardless of the underlying data
structure".

> 1. What is the underlying data structure of this website? Is all the 
> information going to be gathered into and run out of a California database 
> run and owned by ICANN?

No. The website traveresed the data structure down the chain of whois
servers (starting at whois.iana.org). It does not store nor copy the whois
data, besides some short time caching.

It's similar to DNS: A recursive resolver does not copy and stores all the
DNS records worldwide, but is able to obtain the necessary data on the fly.

> 2. Alternatively, might it be a website run by ICANN offering links to the 
> registries and registrars who hold the full Whois data?

No. The results should be present directly on this particular website in
order to fulfill the requirements of the AoC literaly:

  maintain timely, unrestricted and public access to accurate and complete
  WHOIS information, including registrant, technical, billing, and
  administrative contact information. 

In order to overcome the problems, shown by user experiance report, the
website needs to be multilingual not only in terms of the user interface but
also in the presentation of the gathered data.

Of course, the website needs to show the sources and the way how the
information was obtained, where it is really stored and why. That's the
minimal requirement from (my) understanding of (European) data protection
laws.

> 3. Do you think this would become the place in which all people search for 
> all gTLD whois data?

Yes, that's the intention of the proposal.

> If so, could there be a scalability problem if all 
> people (law enforcement, domain name purchasers, etc) go to one website for 
> all Whois searches? Is there some liability to ICANN should such a site go 
> down?

Yes, that's the reasoning behind the proposal: The AoC urges ICANN to
provide such an unrestricted access. Unfortunly many registries does rate
limit the access or does not provide all the required data.

ICANN - as the operator of the proposed website - has the power to enforce
it's own policies by using it's own contracts with the parties in question.

This way the proposal collapses the differences between real world and AoC
at a single point within the organisation which is able to solve the problem.

> 4. Are we advocating a particular policy/technical solution or is the 
> implementation open to discussion in the GNSO and other policy groups 
> within ICANN?

We - as a group - are limited to the such a proposal and might add some
personal reasoning (like this).

Personally I do run such an "all-whois" website since 1996 and do have some
ideas how it should be implemented and which operational policy should be
enforced. But that's outside of our scope.