To:
Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>
Cc:
ietf-whois@imc.org, ietf-not43@lists.research.netsol.com, dbwg@arin.net, Woeber@cc.univie.ac.at, ietf-provreg@cafax.se, w3c-p3p-specification@w3.org, iesg@isi.edu
From:
"Derek J. Balling" <dredd@megacity.org>
Date:
Thu, 5 Sep 2002 14:12:33 -0400
In-Reply-To:
<200209051732.g85HWQP3075043@nic-naa.net>
Sender:
owner-ietf-provreg@cafax.se
Subject:
Re: Request to Move RFC 954 to Historic Status
On Thursday, September 5, 2002, at 01:32 PM, Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine wrote: > [ietf-whois and related lists] I won't pretend that I'm on all of these mailing list in that CC line, but I am at least on a few. :-) > I decided not to include a mapping from the DCA language to a P3P > schema, > as for many, the policy scope question (controlling jurisdiction and > legal > theory, e.g., "fair trade" (US) vs "human rights" (EU)), not the > mechanism > for description and policy-scoped access, is more interesting, and > both XML > and schemas and/or DTDs are a distraction. I'll add it to -01. > > Your comments are welcome. A lot of this discussion appears to sort of happen "over my head" so please forgive me a bit if I seem stupid or something. ;-) Part of my "night job" is the maintenance of the rfc-ignorant.org site, including the "whois.rfc-ignorant.org" zone, listing both individual domains with bad/missing/inaccurate WHOIS data, and [using a different result code], ccTLD's with similar problems. We have a wide variety of users who utilize our service, including universities and commercial establishments. Some of them, obviously, use "the entire list" and some use "everything but the ccTLD wildcard entries". It is fairly difficult to ascertain accurately what percentage is behaving how, in that regard. In our experience, there is - as you note - two different mindsets to registry operators. The USian perspective seems to be "you're part of a shared namespace, other folks have a right to know who you are", and the EU perspective seems to be, simply, "no you don't". (!US,!EU) tend to be either split into thirds between US, EU, and "no whois server at all". I believe that the main problem of RFC954 is that it tries to (well, it DOES) define both a protocol and a policy. In the absence of a document which defines "just the protocol", though, which could obsolete RFC954, the removal of 954 to HISTORIC status is a misnomer. It *is* an active protocol in use by registries around the world. It is also an accurate statement to say that 954 is horribly out of date and doesn't necessarily reflect "the real state of the world" in many of the things it contains within the document, and I think such "dated" statements taint the value of both the protocol portions of the document, and the "spirit" of the document. In my ideal world, I believe that the "vision" of complete WHOIS information that 954 describes is still, in fact, a BCP, despite what some EU members might think. (it's ok, you're entitled to disagree with me *grin*) I can respect the desire for privacy that some feel is important. However, I think in a networking environment such as we have today, it is equally - if not more - important, to be able to contact folks via "a range of available methods", to be able to do so quickly without jumping through various registry-induced hoops, and to be able to obtain that complete info via a standardized protocol. (Too many ccTLD operators point people at web pages, which - unless there is a standard - breaks automated tools quite handily). The short version of this is, I guess, "I think relegating 954 to HISTORIC status is premature, and should be postponed until - at bare minimum - a new/updated RFC defines the protocol, and preferably until there is both a protocol RFC as well as a policy RFC". We can debate what the policy RFC would say at a later date. ;-) Cheers, D -- +------------------------------+--------------------------------+ | Derek J. Balling | "You can get more with a kind | | dredd@megacity.org | word and a two-by-four, than | | www.megacity.org/blog/ | you can with just a kind | | | word." - Marcus | +---------------------------------------------------------------+