[Rt4-whois] Questions on Recommendation 17

[Kathy Kleiman]

Lutz, thank you for the link, and the discussion. I personally don't see 
a clear requirement, under the AOC, for ICANN to run a service itself 
(or contract for the service).  It is about the policies...

Historically, I thought your suggestion of the portal arose (or got 
momentum) in our discussions because of "findability" and some of the 
recent work (work towards the end of our year) that showed the survey 
participants having trouble finding Whois data generally and thick Whois 
data in particular.

So I thought and agree that we should address the issue of "findability" 
which, I believe, has both policy and operational possibilities. 
Frankly, I think education, pointers, explanations, and clarifications 
COULD be run by ICANN -- to help clarify the field (e.g., a page with 
links to every thick and thin gTLD registry/registrar and an overview of 
thick and thin registries and where to find Whois data).

On the flip side, I would like to better understand the implications of 
ICANN running a search portal -- and what happens when all Whois 
searches go through one site. As an old CS/IT person, that was always 
the scenario we wanted to avoid... and today the searches (as we so well 
know) are decentralized. I hope people will comment.

On a related note, please see the comments from ICANN Chair Steve 
Crocker (who created the RFC/Request for Comment process years ago 
within the IETF). They are well-reasoned and thorough and we need to 
think through our answers, responses, and possible clarifications, 
changes, expansions, additional reasoning, etc.  (as with all comments).

I am offline today teaching, but back later. Lutz, I am so sorry you 
can't join us in CR, and truly hope for rapid and full recovery!

All the best,
Kathy
:
> On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 10:19:33AM -0500, Kathy Kleiman wrote:
>> Thank you for the detailed answers below. I am still working through them
>> and urge others to review them closely as well.  I would very much like to
>> see the "all-whois" website you have been running since 1996 -- would you
>> be willing to share the link?
> The current state (focused on the German speaking community) is
>   http://www.iks-jena.de/eng/Tools/Whois
>
> It's mostly useful for looking up IP addresses, especially IPv6 transition
> addresses like 2001:0:d911:c0d9:0:fbde:3d50:212c or 2002:d911:c0d9::1
>
> The majority of users come from the German Law Enforcement (low level
> crime), simply because they are happy to call German speaking people in the
> case of trouble.
>
>> There does seem to be a difference in how we view the AoC. I never saw as
>> **requiring ** ICANN to have an operational role in running websites
> You are absolutly right. The AoC does not urge ICANN to operate a service at
> it's own. But - in order to fulfill the requirements from the AoC - the only
> party, which can run such a service, is ICANN itself. Therefore the proposal.
>
>> I will send back more detailed comments shortly.  Thank you for this
>> discussion online and, hopefully, in CR as well. And thanks for the link to
> No, I'll not make it to CR. I was ill (recurrent corneal erosion) between
> the years and be urged to do not travel that far in the next few months.


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