Uniformity and Centralization

 

Submission #: 1176 (commercial)

If there was a central database accessed for whois requests it could record the identity of the person making the request so that if they used the information for an unauthorised reason it would be possible to identify them and block their ongoing access.

 

Submission #: 1519 (other Attorney)

My primary interest in the WhoIs database is in finding and putting a stop to cybersquatters. It would be nice to have boolean search capabiities across all tlds so that I could find infringing domains. It is imperitive that I be able to find contact information on infringing websites.

 

Submission #: 1657 (other Outsourced IT firm)

Although I see the shadow of "Big Brother" looming over the idea of centralized control I still prefer the way domain registration was handled under the old DARPA contract. By distributing registration and control of information to multiple parties across the network, the vagaries of individual search/change preferences tend to confuse the issue and permit inaccuracies to replicate, often causing loopbacks, misdirected pointers, etc. I would also like to see some sort of mandantory rule-set for Name Server administration and Zone transfer to insure accurate updating of DNS servers.

 

Submission #: 1892 (non-commercial)

Privacy must be respected by not bulk-selling customer information in any form. You must, however, allow free public access to the information through whois so the public can use the information to solve problems, etc. Currently this information is not easily accessble due to the many registrars for TLD's. A unified system must be set up where all the whois contact information currently accessable from the individual registrar's whois is accessable in one database at internic.net.

 

Submission #: 220 (commercial)

ICANN has no business attempting to regulate or control the practises of ccTLDregistrars. As a result, I do not support any activities by ICANN that will result in such regulation.

 

Submission #: 2557 (individual)

The most important issue in my opinion is: Law enforcement (in all its facets including intellectual property etc.)and the contribution that whois must make in order to facilitate it. The second most important issue is consummer confidence and how whois can bolster e-commerce by bolstering consummer confidence, re-assuring the public that the internet is NOT a place where online merchants can simply hide and disppear at will. Admittedly proper identification of domain owners is only one element that will boost public confidence and e-commerce. All other security issues remain but it is an important element.

 

Submission #: 2564 (commercial)

We believe it is essential that, in so far as possible, a detailed and accurate record of domain owners be available for the public. We do NOT support anonymous registration or the withholding of information pertaining to domains.

 

Submission #: 2565 (non-commercial)

As a non-profit corporation we are especially concerned with privacy issues. However, we believe it is _essential_ that information about domain owners be available to the public. We do not support anonymous registration.

 

Submission #: 2586 (individual)

Businesses should be required to provide and allow to be published full, accurate contact information, including a physical address and a valid e-mail address. Non-business domain holders should be able to keep their details fully confidential -- except for a valid e-mail address.

 

Submission #: 2600 (registrar-registry)


20a. Protection from spam and tehnical abuse from hackers is the the most important personal privacy interest.
20b. Protection from spam and tehnical abuse from hackers is the the most important consumer protection interest.

20c. Protection from fraud and hackers.

20d. No importance unless the registrant is under age.

20e. Technical stability and functionality.

20f. The most important economic interets is that with over 30M domain names registered internationally, WHOIS offers registrants the ability to offer additional information about their website and contact information. As the internet continues to grow, search engines will have greater difficulty managing access to information. WHOIS offes stability and the possibility of at least some accurate information.

20g. Fraudulent transfers and legitimate trademark abuses, not percieved trademark abuses.

20h. WHOIS should be enhanced with additional fields so that additional information about a domain name can be offered. ICANN should be less concerned about privacy and more concerned about offering a single point of pressence of accurate information. It is quite simple to create an anonymous WHOIS record. ICANN should be moving in the opposite direction and should concentrate on enabling domain registrants to offer more details about their websites and the nature of content being distributed. If ICANN were to move in this direction, WHOIS could one day become the next "caller ID."

 

Submission #: 2856 (isp)

We need to absolutely require functional contactinformation. We also need to squelch companies which use registration information for marketing, because if they didn't do this, people would be less shy of entering their personal data correctly.
Using Whois data for marketing should result in immediate termination of any and all domain and network services.
The whois database must be seen, not as property of some lying bunch of incompetents like network solutions, but as a natural quality of the internet. Administrators for it should be guardians, not "owners".
All of the data should be available for anyone to use in any way that contributes to the usability of the internet. (For instance, services like geektools, which collect and refine searches, should be allowed and encouraged.)

 

Submission #: 2868 (individual)

access to this information should not be limited. registrants are well aware or should be made well aware that this information is going to be made available. It's the internet and access to this information and any information is paramount to its success.

 

Submission #: 2932 (other IP Lawyer)


20a. No interest, if you choose to communicate you shoud take your resposibility20b. Consumer can check on the seller of the products
20g. To check ownership for due diligence investigations and for infringement of IP rights.

 

Submission #: 2935 (commercial)

i have performed searches for a domain name, where there are more than, say, 50 results. however, it will only display the first 50. there is no way to get the next set of results.

 

Submission #: 2956 (commercial)


20a. It is a public record, and no presumption of privacy applies to public records.
20b. Correct identification of ownership interests is essential.

20c. Correct identification of ownership interests is essential to law enforcement. The only people who would want to hide their interests are those whose motives are suspect.

20d. Accurate identification of ownership is essential to protecting minors; for example, the persons offering remaxsw.com and austin-remax.com for sale have also associated porn sites with URLs formerly hosted by church groups and homeschooling organizations, exposing innocent children to inappropriate adult materials.

20e. Traceability of the source.

20f. Trademark protection.

20g. Like with trademark protection, you should be able to accurately locate responsible parties if legal action is required.

20h. Like all other ownership matters, this is public information, and the public has a right to open access to it.

 

Submission #: 308 (commercial)


20a. A domain name should be considered to be analogous to a corporate entity. To this extent personal privacy is not a consideration with respect to the Whois database. The owners of domain names need to be accountable for what emanates from their domain, just as a company is accountable for its products. This accountability is best achieved if information about the owner is readily available; imagine not being able to get in touch with Ford if you started experiencing tyre problems on your SUV.
20f. An accurate single global Whois database would vastly improve demographic analysis of server log files. By being able to see which pages are of most interest to people in particular countries cmpanies may be able to modify marketing and advertising strategies approriately. At present trying to resolove the true origin of visitors to a web site involves analysis of imperfect data in two differing formats from RIPE, ARIN and APNIC.

 

Submission #: 379 (commercial)

I like the way the whois database works at the moment accross the various registrars, however able to whois various other TLD, such as .tv, .au ect.. would be good (from all registrars) and not limited to just the 3 most common tld's.

 

Submission #: 382 (commercial)

The biggest abuse is still cybersquatting. Perhaps privacy concerns could be addressed by limiting the number of domain names that could have their addresses kept confidential. The second biggest abuse in terms of current import, but of perhaps greater future concern is the selling of the confidential information. Maybe simply having a personal tld differntiated from com etc. would be a solution.

 

Submission #: 461 (individual)

Lets face it, the whois database is ripped off by spammers and scammers on a regular basis. As more non-technical people apply for personal domains, especially with a personal gTLD arrive, the potential for abuse is greatly increased. ICANN has fallen pray to the usual American corporate disease of not giving a damn about customer privacy and uses the whois information to make a quick buck.
Addreses and telephone numbers should have the ability to be flagged as individual / personal and removed from the domain database. They should only be available to
a) Law enforcement b) Registrars c) The ISP hosting the DNS.
ICANN also has no right to enforce standards on ccTLDs. Certainly within Europe we have a greater right to privacy than the US. Attempting to push EU WHOIS information to display addresses would be a massive backwards step, and hopefully would end up in ICANN being severly slapped by the ccTLDs (face it, you're not popular over here), the users, and most importantly the EU Data Protection registrar.

 

Submission #: 485 (commercial)

Why does it seem suspiciously like the questions in this survey would tend to slant people towards answering in such a way that it would lead to you squashing whois registry info. maintained by ccTLD's ...

 

Submission #: 502 (individual)

Thank you for asking for comments. It would be nice to see the whois database under non-centralized control, but with a centralized portal for lookups. Privacy is important, but so is responsibility for one's actions. Individuals can register domains as oranizations or find a third party to do so if they are concerned about privacy, but there must be accountability at some point, the registrant information should remain available.

 

Submission #: 542 (commercial)

More privacy. More local choices.
Keep ICANN out of it.
Stop all selling of the database.
This should be strictly a techinical service to allow the internet to run smoothly. All other users should be prohibited where possible and/or made as awkward as possible.

 

Submission #: 544 (individual)

A significant law (or policy) enforcement interest is, given an IP address, to identify the authority responsible for the smallest enclosing IP block. RIPE and ARIN (etc.) provide this for subsets of the IPv4 address space; it would be good to have a global registry to identify either a more exact Whois server for the IP (possibly recursive -- many ARIN IP Whois servers are like this), or the smallest enclosing netblock directly.

 

Submission #: 730 (isp)

The whois database for gTLDs must be public because they are international--This makes enforcement against registrants difficult enough in any jurisdiction without adding to the problems. ccTLD policy should not be ICANN's concern--The local registries are in a better position to make such decisions.
The whois database must contain accurate information and this accuracy must be enforced by the threat of loss of domain name if the registrant is uncontactable (after a certain amount of time).
Users wishing to retain privacy should either ask a third party to register their domain or use another domain name. Similarly, if concern over children's domains is in question, then the contact details of an adult should be used.
Whois should only be used to do one-way searches for domain names. It should not provide any additional features.

 

Submission #: 783 (individual)

20a) The most important is that a registrant's physical address not be necessarily obtainable over the web (i.e., 3rd party addresses are important). 20b) Whois should not become an address farm for spam or junk mail.
20c) Organizations which register under a gTLD, and thus operate internationally, should be held to the highest standards possible. Failure to do so harms the entire Internet, whereas failure within a ccTLD harms primarily that country.
20d) See 20c.
20e) Providing technical contact information.
20f) Allowing open and free access to the information.
20g) That trademark holders should be able to requisition only the bare minimum number of domain names necessary to prevent consumer confusion. This not only protects freedom of speech/expression/parody, but it also prevents the holders from needing large numbers of domain names in order to protect their trademark.

 

Submission #: 787 (individual)

In my opinion:* Every TLD should be required to run a WHOIS server, using a standard protocol and data format. * The names/addresses of these servers should be available from a central location, preferably in such a way that they can be retrieved by automated tools; e.g. by being stored in the DNS record for the TLD.

 

Submission #: 805 (other Attorney for trademark holders)


20g. I. The biggest problem with respect to intellectual property rights is that there is no way to stop cybersquatters from hiding their domain name registrations through the use of fake or generic WHOIS data. For example, many cybersquatters have now begun to list themselves only as "domainname.com" or "owner". This greatly increases the costs for small-businesses (and cost-adverse larger businesses) to enforce their trademark rights. UDRP disputes take longer or are impossible to fully investigate, and suing an out-of-state registrar in an in rem proceeding is out of the question for many smaller clients.
II. The second biggest problem is the lack of in inexpensive WHOIS search facility that allows one to search for all domains owned by a single entity. This information ought to be free, and NSI's $200 "Dig for Domains" Program is a shameless attempt to extract money from trademark holders.
II. On a larger level, a third problem is that from a new Internet business development standpoint, Domains are too inexpensive to register right now. The breaking of the NSI monopoly and the subsequent lowering of the costs for persons to register new internet domain names appears to actually have raised the costs for new bona fide businesses to get started on the Internet.
In the old days, it cost $35+/year to register a domain. Now, warehousers do it in bulk for $12.88 per year. The perverse effect is to the encourage speculators to warehouse every single word / combination of words / misspellings, etc in every European language in existence. This actually raises the cost of new businesses, who instead of paying $35/year to NSI for a new name, must now negotiate with some speculator and spend $1000+, to some damn warehouser, who thinks he is a legitimate business person. Increasing the cost for a domain to say, $500 per year (give $450 of it to charity) would dramatically decrease domain name speculation, and would free-up multitudes of domain names for potential use by smaller businesses.

 

Submission #: 932 (individual)

a) I have experienced harassment directly as a result of unethical individuals being able to look up my domain registration details and determine my postal address and telephone number. I am an unlisted number in my city but unless I register domains in a false name this safety precaution is nullified by having my phone number freely available to "just anybody". b) That a registrant's details are not abused, eg not redistributed without their permission.
c) Don't know.
d) In my opinion nobody under the age of 18 should be allowed to have online a domain registered in their name. It's too easy for their personal information to be abused by unscrupulous parties. This would be hard to enforce (no registrar that I'm aware of asks for date-of-birth of the registrant) so I'm also of the opinion that nobody under the age of 18 should be allowed to register a domain in the first place.
e) Not sure (insufficient knowledge).
f) Business and official bodies must have a means of determining whether any breach of copyright, intellectual property or other registered trademark or mark has occurred if another party has knowingly or unknowingly registered a domain name to which they do not have a strong legal right. An individual might unwittingly register a domain name which breaches a copyright and the copyright holder needs some way of contacting that person so a resolution can be negotiated.
g) As above, and in that if IP rights are breached in the content of a website the lawful owner of the intellectual property must have a means of tracing the source, whether it's via an ISP or a privately-held domain.
h) The privacy of the individual, as above.

 

Submission #: 939 (registrar-registry)


20a. I am concerned about the detailed personal information available to people with potentially malicious intentions. There are valid reasons for the data to be accessible in WHOIS, but I do not feel that the more personal information (such as address and phone number) should be easily available, and it should certainly not be searchable! Perhaps the sensative data should only be accessible after a WHOIS user files a request, and the registrant could have the ability to see who has requested the information. I have personally altered my WHOIS records, filling them instead with incorrect data. I have done this in response to a specific incident where a malicious user was trying to gain intimiate information about me. I don't imagine my experience was an isolated incident.

 

Submission #: 978 (commercial)

The Whois databases are the modern equivilant of vehicle registration and driver licence databases. From a law enforcement/information security perspective, they are usually the only means to assist in identifing sources of malicious internet traffic. They should be totally managed by government.