Re: Merging RRP and Whois

> > Whois is a privacy balance
>
> no.  whois is a very simple protocol on port 43.

Sure RFC 954 "whois" pretty much as "send a command" and maybe get an
answer.  But we are, I believe, talking about something rather evolved
from that.

There is an expressed need, particularly driven by trademark interests,
for there to be a formalized way of digging through registration data,
often with grep-like string matching operations, and with an increasing
need for standardized formats so that it can be all done without humans
reading the results.

In addition, there is a pressure - driven by ICANN's contracts with the
DNS registrars - to have a unified mechanism in which there would be a
single service point-of-contact through which a single query operation
would result in a result that is the merger of the results from any number
of registrars.  Moreover, there would be different classes of service
rendered (i.e. some folks could do more exotic string searching) depending
on whether one is a trademark practitioner (more access, higher query
rate) or just one of us chickens (less access, lower query rate.)

Considering that the data being scanned and delivered contains personally
identifiable data, data that is frequently going to be used for an
entirely distinct and different purpose than that for which the domain
name registrant or IP address block delegee surrendered his/her
information in the first place, we certainly do have a significant privacy
concern to deal with.

		--karl--