[At-Large] [WHOIS-WG] Fwd: WHOIS Policy Review Team Final Report

[Antony Van Couvering]

If I were criminally-minded, I would simply use IDNs, which are essentially unsearchable as far I understand. 

For a perspective on how a verified whois would work in practice (and on how useless it would be, and how much it would cost) see a recent article from a domainer publication:

http://domainnamewire.com/2012/05/15/heres-what-law-enforcement-wants-you-to-do-before-registering-a-domain/

Antony


On May 15, 2012, at 1:23 PM, Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 09:16:04AM -0700, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
>> I don't know what Patrick was thinking, but it's possible he was referring
>> to the fact that the ALAC position on Whois is nearly indistinguishable
>> from the wish list of the trademark lobby
> 
> True ... sad, but true.
> 
>> The flaw in the position of the Whois Policy Review Team is quite simple:
>> only the most idiotic of criminals would provide real Whois information,
>> and without comparison of state-issued documents to registration
>> information, there is no way to reliably check it.
> 
> That's only true with a thick whois model. The thin whois model, which
> reveals the contract information down the reseller chain, is much more
> stable and reliable even in the case of a "compromised" registar (might be
> run by organized crime itself).
> 
> You might have a look at this thin whois model by asking whois.iana.org.
> 
> The real charm of this approach is, that the data does not need to leave the
> place where they are needed to establish the business itself. So the access
> restrictions can and must be derived from local law, which causes a much
> better privacy protection (at least for EU) than an centralized thick whois
> database, searchable by everyone who can pay or cry for.
> 
> Yes I do hear the cry for "use cases". So the suggestion came up to urge
> ICANN to run a central, multilingual interface(!) to query and access the
> distributed data sources.
> 
> Why should ICANN operate the service? Simply because they *have* the
> contracts which allows them to query the databases at any rate and to any
> detail level, they need. Nobody else can prevent to be blocked out by
> various resellers or registrars. Such a block would render this interface
> useless.
> 
> Unfortunly this recommendation did not make it to the final report, only a
> crippled version dealing with an uninteresting case of gTLD strangeness.
> 
> I was unable to fight better for this idea. Sorry.
>