Re: Merging RRP and Whois

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

George,

I brought this up during the BoF in San Diego, if only because I'd spent
the last half of the previous week in Munich with the data commissioners
from Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein ... Jaap made much the same point in
the ietf-whois list w.r.t. the Dutch commissioners in his mail of Jan 19.

Whois (as we know it, aka the absurdly underspecified thingee on port 43)
if used correctly, repurposes and adds 3rd-party recipients to registrant
data, without notice or consent of the registrant. 

As you note, RRP and Whois both provide views into repositories of data
associated with a transaction, however, the interests of registrants (and
their associated jurisdictions) and the interests of registrars (and their
competitive business models, and eventual liquidators, ala toysmart's) and
the interests of the registries (and their competitive business models, and
eventual successors), aren't trivially reduced to some sensible service model.

I wouldn't assume that the views are equivalent, or the scope of repository
examination (temporal and spatial), or the underlying data, or even the
basic original transaction. Maybe there is just one type of "original
transaction", but I suspect legacy, transfer, bulk and so forth will have
some property which distinguishes them from transactions in which the role
of the registrar is minimal. I'm certain that the underlying data isn't
equivalent, given the repurpose and recipient (marketers, law enforcement,
original jurisdiction) aspects. I'm open on the unified vs disjoint model
for repository examination, and examination ordering. Views just revisits
the purpose and recipient issue, modified by the view construction policy.

One of these two activites is critical infrastructure, the other is not.

One of these two has a hard implementation date, as Ed mentioned, and the
other does not, or has a schedule which requires ICANN's participation,
if not other complications.

Cheers,
Eric