[arin-ppml] Whois Archival Policy?

[David Williamson]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:15:20PM -0400, heather skanks wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> 
> > From: http://www.47-usc-230c2.org
> > (Seven weeks ago, during my phone conversation with ARIN officials relating
> > to the *SF Bay Packet Radio* IP address block, I requested from ARIN a
> > copy of their archived WHOIS record for the 134.17.0.0/16 IP address
> > block, as it existed on any date prior to the formation of Mr. Mulligan's
> > *SF Bay Packet Radio, LLC*. ARIN declined my request on the basis of their
> > lack of a "policy" under which such archival and formerly publicly available
> > WHOIS data could be provided by ARIN to members of the media or other
> > interested parties.)
> >
> >
> > I'd like to find out from members of the community how they feel about the
> > idea of having such a policy.
> >
> 
> Such a policy already exists.  NRPM 3.1

It's ambiguous.  There is a bulk whois policy, but, lacking any
specific verbiage, it would seem to permit bulk whois queries for
*current* data only.  I think Owen wants to know the state of a whois
record from, for example, 1999.  In this case, it's not the number of
queries that is interesting (which is what 3.1 tries to address, I
think), but the date.

I'd be in favor of access to a wayback machine, although I have no idea
of how technically difficult it would be to provide such a service.
Actually, upon some reflection, it sounds fairly hard.  The same rules
should apply: normal query rates (one or two at a time) would be
permitted, bulk transfers would fall under 3.1.  Ideally, whois would
provide this as part of the protocol, but the majority of clients
probably lack any way to specify a date string. :)

-David