[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-11: Purpose and Scope of WHOIS Di rectory

[jlewis at lewis.org]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Lee Howard wrote:

> To what extent are the following statements true?

Depends on what you're hoping to get out of whois.

>   WHOIS without naming the end user is not much use.
> 
>   End user information without contact information, as currently allowed
>   as reassign-simple, is not much use.

Without a clear name or contact info, whois could still tell you how large 
an assignment covering a particular IP is.  For abuse tracking, if you 
receive spam from a few IPs in the same range, it's handy to be able to 
see how large that range is, and apply policy to the entire range rather 
than wait to be spammed from each IP in it.

>   Except for spammer address-harvesting and showing utilization to ARIN,
>   WHOIS is not much use.

IMO, there should be names and contact info at least at the allocation
level.  If you're being spammed, attacked, hacked from an IP, or have a
BGP customer wanting to announce routes to you, etc., it's nice to be able
to do a whois and see who's responsible for that IP space.

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