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Whois: Whois Data
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Current WHOIS policies require accurate WHOIS information without having established appropriate privacy and data protection safeguards. It is important to understand that enforcement of accuracy of WHOIS data has serious implications on privacy. Some domain name registrants have legitimate reasons for providing inaccurate WHOIS information -- for example, to protect their privacy and protect their personally identifiable information from being globally, publicly accessible -- and especially when there are no privacy safeguards in place. A number of studies demonstrate that when no privacy safeguards are in place, individuals often engage in privacy "self-defense." When polled on the issue, individuals regularly claim that they have withheld personal information and have given false information. See:
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The need for web-based clients came from the fact that command-line WHOIS clients largely existed only in the Unix and large computing worlds. Microsoft Windows and Macintosh computers had no WHOIS clients, so registrars had to find a way to provide access to WHOIS data for potential customers. Many end-users still rely on such clients, even though command line and graphical clients exist now for most home PC platforms.
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WHOIS has been examined by the US Congress, ICANN, and many other legal or policy bodies. ICANN initiated in November 2007 a study of WHOIS data accuracy; the first report from the study is expected February 2008.
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ICANN's WHOIS Task Forces Review Progress at Rome Meeting. The three taskforces established by the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council to examine WHOIS issues met for almost a full day in Rome. Each task force gave their interim report and solicited public comment. The public comment period highlighted the difficulty the task forces face due to their required separation from one another - for example, the Access group cannot discuss what elements are included and the Data Elements group cannot discuss the degree of access to the data. The discussions of the other task forces are considered "out of scope." Also out of scope for the task force examining Accuracy requirements is the issue of privacy of personal data. While pleasing to the Intellectual Property lawyers, this was a point of concern for many audience members, particularly the non-commercial and individual users.
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Different registrars' WHOIS servers return results in different formats, making automation of parsing WHOIS data difficult. While such automation has many legitimate uses (primarily for ISPs), it ... lends itself to use by spammers and other people acting unethically.
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