[ppml] New WHOIS policy approved

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

> Go back further. Look at RFC 812
> http://rfc.sunsite.dk/rfc/rfc812.html

Wrong reference. It is this document that goes
back to 1970: 
http://web.archive.org/web/20021203012845/http://www.ifla.org/documents/internet/hari1.txt
Also I forgot that SRI stands for Stanford Research Institute
so you are correct that this is SRI-NIC times.
The thesis mentions both the ARPANET directory on paper and
the online NIC service.

Also, the first SPAM sent in 1978 used the NIC directory
to select recipients:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

And the NIC directory was integral to some protocols
such as FTP defined in RFC 385
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc385.txt
Look at paragraph 13.

The original whois was an extremely simple protocol to
allow direct network access to this NIC Name directory.
You will note that the FTP definition assumed that the
host would have complete copy of the NIC Name directory
whereas whois allowed access to just the single entry 
that was required.

To understand what the NIC was back in those days, RFC 115
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc115.txt is useful to read. As
you can see the NIC included functions that ended up outside
of both ARIN and the domain name registries. This is the
environment where the habit of filing whois entries
originated. Since that time, there has not been any public
scrutiny of these habits or the purpose behind them.

Arguably, the world has changed a lot since ARPANET days
and the functions of the original NICNAME/WHOIS directory
has largely been distributed to ISPs and end user organizations
who operate mail servers. It is time to take a comprehensive
look at our whois policy and our whois directory. Martin 
Hannagan and David Divins have both pointed out different
areas in which our inherited non-policy has problems. 

In 1992 a certain John Curran co-authored RFC 1355:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1355.txt
I'm not certain that ARIN meets the standards set out in 
this RFC and I do not recall that ARIN's whois policy and
procedures have ever been reviewed against this document.

--Michael Dillon