Request to Move RFC 954 to Historic Status

[Derek J. Balling]

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It is also an accurate statement to say that 954 is horribly out of 
date and doesn't necessarily reflect "the real state of the world" in 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 at megacity.org           |  word and a two-by-four, than  |
| www.megacity.org/blog/       |  you can with just a kind      |
|                              |  word."               - Marcus |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+