[dbwg] WHOIS Modification - Part 1 of 2 (fwd)

[william at elan.net]

I suspect that primary reason for putting city, state, zip code data into 
one line is to save space and not have to provide too many lines in the 
output and probably same was the reason for taking address out of default 
whois output and there is no particular reason that ARIN has to make it 
"difficult" to parse data. In fact if anything arin would probably try 
the opposite (anybody from ARIN care to comment here?).

And as for people/companies getting the data for marketing purposes, I can 
assure you that separate query would in no way stop them and if anything 
they actually like address data in one line/field - most really do not 
care about particular city/state, they just want entire address for 
whatever mailing they are going to do.

As for AUP, why not do it? Its not too difficult and provides at least
some "verbal" protection to make sure "honest" companies to not abuse 
data. As for it not being easily enforcable, this may change in the 
future and if somebody really bad is found to be abusing the data, some 
civil action maybe taken by ARIN. The reasons for doing it are somewhat 
similar to domain registries and as you're aware all registrars in 
.com/.net/.org and most country regisrars have AUP. This should really be 
separate discussion on the mailing list and not part whois modification 
proposal and unless I see any serious comments on this list why AUP 
somewhat similar to what is done for bulk whois output (including 2002-4) 
should not be made a general AUP on arin whois data (with one-line url 
reference to it from arin whois output), I'll introduce this as 
discussion and policy some time later on. 

William Leibzon
william at elan.net

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

From: Einar Bohlin (ebohlin at uu.net)
To: dbwg at ARIN.NET
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 18:17:35 EST
Subject: RE: [dbwg] WHOIS Modification - Part 1 of 2 (fwd)

Hi, 


Good point, why don't we just present the data the 
way it's submitted: 


OrgName: Ministry of Colleges and Universities 
OrgID: MCU-1 
Org Address: 
Org Address: 
Org City: 
Org State/Province: 
Org Postal Code: 
Org Country Code: 


That should be pretty easy to parse. 


For whom are we making this data so easy to parse? 
This has me wondering if the address was left out of 
resource records and then presented all in one line 
in an attempt to make the info difficult to parse, 
perhaps to protect the data somewhat. I wasn't at 
the meeting, was that discussed? Somebody must have 
been thinking about this because I saw in the meeting 
notes a reference to putting an unenforceable AUP on 
the whois output. 


Regards, 


Einar Bohlin 
IP Analyst 
IP Team - Ashburn Virginia 
UUNET/WorldCom 
Phone: USA 703 886-7362 
email: einar.bohlin at wcom.com 
(VNET 806-7362)