-----Original Message----- From: bmanning(a)vacation.karoshi.com [mailto:bmanning(a)vacation.karoshi.com] Sent: Wednesday, 29 September 2004 1:11 p.m. To: Juha Saarinen Cc: bmanning(a)vacation.karoshi.com; nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] so ... what is the real reason there is whois anyway?
On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 01:04:48PM +1200, Juha Saarinen wrote:
bmanning(a)vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
so... which is operationally more important, DNS or whois?
which would you rather see turned off?
Turning off (or just anonymising) whois wouldn't break the Intarweb, but it would have seriously undesirable effects.
Interweb?
what side effects do you think accrue from the effect of turning off or anonymising whois? (both good and bad)
what side effects do you think accure from the effect of turning off the DNS (both good and bad) ** i posit that it is not reasonable to consider "anonymising" the DNS.
Just on that point, InternetNZ has just set up a working group (http://www.dnc.org.nz/story/30180-29-1.html) to review the whois policy. As far as I know the "great and holy powers that be" don't have any pre-ordained conclusions as to the outcome, so once they call for it, submission on desired changes will be most useful. The whois issue is pretty controversial as internationally free speech advocates, anti spam forces, law enforcement agencies, consumer and privacy groups, technical groups all have fairly strong and difficult to reconcile views on what data should be made available in response to whois queries. If one did not have address, fax and e-mail data listed in the whois, then there would be far less of a reason to restrict zone file transfers. But a lot of people find that whois data very useful for legitimate reasons. Thuis current policy is to list it all, but restrict bulk access to it, as best as possible. DPF