[At-Large] Issue Report on Thick Whois

[Christian de Larrinaga]

Alan 

I'm pro thick whois but only where policy locally can support proxy registration services on proviso there are processes to deal with specific cases of abuse (technical, administrative, ownership).  This  needs to be local so that local jurisdictions can establish their own flavour of policies and provide registrants and users with choice and information. 

Imposing a one size fits all global policy on all localities tends to lead to technical suspensions of domains due to registration inaccuracies (deliberate or not) rather than for the underlying problem behaviour. This has the capacity to increase instabilities in the DNS.  Choice for users and registrants depends largely on maintaining an Internet environment where local policies have room to effectively exist and be available to users globally. 

Many domain owners have legitimate reasons to need privacy. This need for privacy where it exists should not be used a rationale by Registry or Registrar operators to control (own) as a trade secret the information in their registries. It should in my view be there to support registrants within an environment of local safeguards for users. 

A PDP should re-address the importance of the local dimensions for Internet Policy development and management in my view. In other words be bottom up not simply in developing a policy but most importantly in its day to day management. 



Christian

On 22 Nov 2011, at 01:08, Alan Greenberg wrote:

> 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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