[WHOIS-WG] WEIRDS and Whois

[Holly Raiche]

HI Everyone

I'm not sure if you all have been following the exchanges involving John Levine, but I am now rather disheartened about Whois and accuracy.

The green/blue text is mine.  What John is saying essentially, is that the WEIRDS Working Group is not going to produce something that can address the legitimate privacy concerns raised by Whois. (Maybe that's the reason the GNSO statement on Whois is as negative as it is - on privacy grounds, noone should have to reveal any details about themselves - and they understand there will be no movement towards a better outcome.)

So what we seem to have now is a Board that has not really adopted the Whois Final Report (see this blog) http://news.dot-nxt.com/2013/01/16/deja-whois#comment-7143., RAA negotiations stuck on what is meant by registrars verifying the data accuracy, and the possibility of a technical solution to the privacy issue disappearing over the horizon!

It's beginning to feel as if we are going backwards on the issue - but I'm happy to be corrected.


Holly 



>> From what you are saying, the messages given at Toronto aren't going to 
>> happen.

The IETF is 100% run by volunteers, and is open to anyone willing to show 
up and do the work.  Most of the work is done on mailing lists and by 
submitting and reviewing draft documents online, so the barriers to 
participation are very low.

Nevertheless, of the many people who insisted it was very very very 
important that WEIRDS produce a spec for names, approximately none of them 
are on the WIERDS mailing list or have done any work.  Thie tells me, and 
the rest of the IETF, that in fact the ICANN community does not consider 
this to be an important problem.  (If it's not important enough for you to 
work on it, it's not important for us, either.)

> I hope, therefore, at the Beijing meeting, you - or someone from the 
> group - will give a presentation

Sorry, I have actual work to do for real clients and a $0 budget for ICANN 
junkets.  If someone thinks it's worth putting together a talk for 
Beijing, the drafts and the list archives are not hard to find.

> What is being developed by the IETF is the WEIRDS protocol which, 
> amongst other things, will allow differentiated access to Whois data. 
> This will allow those who want to exercise their legitimate right to 
> privacy to do so, ...

Sorry, no, that's not what WEIRDS is doing.

For one thing, WEIRDS is really about redoing WHOIS for IP addresses.  As 
the group was being chartered, a bunch of people showed up, loudly 
demanded that we do names as well, and then predictably disappeared 
without doing any work.  (Not quite all, one or two guys are toiling away, 
but given how poorly the names community understands the issues, I doubt 
there will be much progress.)  So WEIRDS is unlikely to produce anything 
for names.  We knew this would happen, so the charter specifically allows 
the IP address work to go ahead while the names spin their wheels.

Even if it does, the differentiated access is nothing new.  Try looking up 
six names in a row at Godaddy's WHOIS server, and you'll find that it 
starts providing much less info in each response, unless you're connecting 
from an IP for which they've relaxed the rate limits.  The WEIRDS stuff 
just provides a cleaner way to do what existing WHOIS servers do with 
per-IP rate limits and CAPTCHAs.

And please keep in mind that the IETF has exactly zero interest in getting 
involved in policy disputes, so we'll design a way that a client can pass 
credentials to a WEIRDS server, but not what the server does with those 
credentials.  This project is to provide a spec that the RIRs and perhaps 
name registries can use to do what they do now, but in a way that scales 
better and is easier to script.
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