[NA-Discuss] Getting the WHOIS word out to users

[John L]

> If the public thinks having a public WHOIS will stop spam, #1 they're
> misled, #2 they'll support it.

Sorry to disturb the discussion by injecting some facts here, but last 
week I was at a joint meeting in Washington of MAAWG, which is the where 
the anti-abuse people from large ISPs all over the world meet, and LAP, 
which is where civil and criminal anti-abuse law enforcement get together. 
Real people at ISPs and law enforcement really use the current WHOIS, 
crummy though it is, to figure out who's abusing their networks, track 
them down, and more than you might realize, put them in jail.  They would 
of course prefer if registrars made a nominal attempt to verify the junk 
that their customers put into WHOIS, but the current WHOIS is way more 
useful to them than no WHOIS at all, or the pessimal OPOC proposal which 
puts an unverified alleged contact in front of the current unverified 
info.

> There are technical solutions to spam

Man, that is so 1995.  If there were technical solutions to spam, don't 
you think we would have solved it by now?  We have a bunch of technical 
stuff in the pipeline to help authenticate real mail, but the approaches 
to increasingly organized and criminal spammers are primarily social, 
political, and legal, not technical.

R's,
John