[At-Large] Impressions from the Whois-Review

[Karl Auerbach]

On 02/03/2011 12:57 AM, Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:

>> For instance, I've got TXT records under the name whois.cavebear.com
>
> I also took this approach for my private TLD "bofh" (@2001:4bd8:1::1).
> Unfortunly it does not work for two reasons:
>
>    a) Whois was designed to be an out of band way to contact the responsible
>       person in order to repair broken network or host setups.

I've always felt that the arguments about "the original intent of whois" 
are written by people who weren't there at the time.  The early listings 
of people on the net were much more like a club roster than a public 
directory.

Getting to your comment about repairing things: That argument makes 
sense (a great deal of sense) for the IP address whois.  But I don't 
find it very strong in the domain name whois, which is the one we mainly 
talk about for the following reason:

Today's domain name operator is usually hardly the kind of technical 
animal that would qualify as a network manager with the ability to 
repair much of anything.

On the other hand, folks listed in IP address whois generally have a 
great deal of ability to fix things.

	--karl--