Policy Proposal 2001-7

[John K. Doyle, Jr.]

On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Lee Howard wrote:

> The only difference I see between the current practice and the proposed
> policy is that access will not be limited to those conducting research.
> Can anyone provide an example of a legitimate non-research use for bulk
> WHOIS, or other rationale for this proposed policy?

One _potentially_ legitimate use would be the identification of address
space assigned to those countries on the U.S. DoJ/DoC "no export" list. I
know that, flawed as the mechanism may be, this is ONE of the checks run
by at least one large corporate software repository ("download") site in
order to comply with the law.

Yes, I do realize that such a check, by itself, is not going to be
effective. I mention it here to illustrate that there are "legitimate" 
(non-SPAM) uses for such access to the database.

John