[ALAC] Issue Report on Thick Whois
Alan Greenberg
alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca
Tue Nov 22 01:08:13 UTC 2011
One of the recommendations of the IRTP-B Policy Development Process
(PDP) was for the GNSO to investigate requiring all gTLD Registries
to use a "Thick" Whois.
With thick Whois, all of the Whois information related to a
registration is maintained by the Registry. With "Thin" Whois, the
only information maintained by the Registry is the current status of
the registration and identification of who the sponsoring Register
is; the rest of the information and specifically that related to the
Registrant is kept by the Registrar, making Whois a widely
distributed database.
Currently most Registries use thick Whois, and thick Whois is
required for all gTLDs to be created under the new gTLD program. The
only Registries that use thin Whois are operated by Verisign, but
these of course include .com and .net which constitute the majority
of gTLD registrations.
In response to the IRTP-B recommendation, the GNSO requested and
Issue Report and a preliminary version is now available and has been
posted for public comment. Comments on this document will be received
until 30 December, 2011. See
http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/thick-whois-preliminary-report-21nov11-en.htm.
The report confirms that the issue is within the scope of ICANN and
the GNSO and recommends that the GNSO initiate a Policy Development
Process on the issue.
The primary purpose of this comment period is to ensure that the
Issue Report does indeed address all of the relevant aspects of the
issue. However, it will likely also be the only formal opportunity
for the ALAC to state whether it recommends that a PDP should be
initiated or not.
I have not yet reviewed the document in sufficient depth to say
whether I feel that it is complete, but on an initial review, it
looks fine. My personal belief is that the ALAC should strongly
support the initiation of a PDP on this issue.
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