Logistical and legal matters are intended to be covered by this proposal. A. Stage 1: Distribution to safe place ----------------------------------- The registries are encouraged to transfer entire WHOIS records to one or more places which are recognized as central repositories (REP). This could be RIPE/APNIC/ARIN, the new to be formed ccTLD organizations (like RIPE CENTR) and for gTLD's their corresponding organizations (e.g. CORE/InterNIC) or some other agreed upon sites. Transfer could either be from a registry to the REP's or vice versa, by means of file transfer, mirroring or other, but the entire process (storage at registry, transfer and storage at REP) should be reasonably well protected. B. Stage 2: Distribution to the public ----------------------------------- Contractors to the registries should be allowed to disseminate above WHOIS data to the public and to extract certain data from them according to their needs (e.g. to provide overviews, to watch the registration of marks etc.). Let's call these contractors DIST. The DIST should be required to a) agree on an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) set up by the registries and to include the AUP with any data published by DIST. b) sign a contract with the REP's where use of data, access to data, responsibilities, price, origin of data, periodicity of gathering data, non-disclosed data etc. is stated. Any statistics extracted by DIST's are unofficial unless approved by the registries. The registries may derive stats by themselves through REP's which are then official. Above proposal should ensure distribution of WHOIS data in a well controlled manner and should protect registrants from misuse of their (personal) data. Use of WHOIS data for advertising or other commercial activities and/or for unsolicited mail is considered as abuse and should be avoided. In addition, the proposal may encourage the development of other technical facilities to present and distribute WHOIS data to the public (e.g. LDAP) and may have consequences to current and future WHOIS implementations (e.g. referral WHOIS data base, RWHOIS) and may lead to improved facilities for the public (e.g. fuzzy matches when only partial information is known like location and type of business). Examples: -------- Existing global WHOIS searches: http://www.netnames.com http://www.allwhois.com Existing AUP's: http://www.ripe.net/db/dbcopyright.html http://www.nic.ch/whois_readme.html Existing contracts: I'm only aware of 2: Nominet and SWITCH. The latter's contract is only available on paper. Marcel -------- Logged at Mon Apr 27 22:26:02 MET DST 1998 ---------