[ppml] Last Call for Comment: Policy Proposal 2003-3

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

>WHO SHOULD BE IN THE DATABASE

>   DCA requests that each individual with a directory on an ARPANET or
>   MILNET host, who is capable of passing traffic across the DoD
>   Internet, be registered in the NIC WHOIS Database.  MILNET TAC users
>   must be registered in the database."

That's the RFC origins which I paraphrased earlier. But I also said
that whois was apparently established for funding reasons, i.e. to
identify the users of a resource that someone else was paying for
as part of justifying that funding. Here is a DDN management bulletin
regarding TAC users that might clarify this:
http://www.phreak.org/archives/The_Hacker_Chronicles_II/network2/26.txt

The way things stand now, there is no good documented reason whatsoever 
for having any sort of whois directory including ARIN's SWIP database.
The only justifications in the documents are, 1) tradition, 2) the need
for military research network users to justify their funding. We could
always punt the problem in the general direction of the IETF and ICANN
but, somehow I think we could come up with a more reasonable solution
within ARIN.

--Michael Dillon

Here is some more whois history
http://cs-www.ncsl.nist.gov/secalert/ddn/DCA_Circular.310-P115-1
http://www.digital-root.com/database/textfiles/guides/arpanet2.txt
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8708.mm.www/0045.html
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8811.mm.www/0037.html
http://www.phreak.org/archives/The_Hacker_Chronicles_II/network2/84.txt
http://www.sri.ucl.ac.be/normes/rfc/ien103.txt