A growing group of net privacy advocates is presurring Internet overseer ICANN into scrapping WHOIS, the web's domain-name 'phone book'.
WHOIS was defined as an RFC standard in 1982 as a means of obtaining contact names, addresses and numbers for the registered owners of web addresses. Performing a WHOIS query on a domain name/IP, locates the appropriate database and interrogates it for the owner's details.
In the case of businesses, this can include administrative and technical contacts, along with the address at which the company operates. The WHOIS service is useful for people who need to get in contact with site owners, be they lawyers, journalists, concerned visitors seeking to contact the administrator, and so on.
But WHOIS can also be abused by spammers and fraudsters. And that's why, according to the Associated Press, privacy advocates want rid of it.
The root of the problem for those against the current WHOIS system, is that different domain regulators provide varying options on what information is provided via a WHOIS query.
For example, with some it is possible to pay for "hidden-whois", whereby the actual contact details are kept hidden, the regulator providing the web equivalent of a PO-box. Others allow third party agents to be registered.
The varying options make it difficult for domain owners to properly protect themselves, claim the lobbyists. The "sunset" proposal, which is likely to be presented to ICANN on Wednesday 31st October, asserts that registrants shoudn't need to publish some of the personal information they have to submit during registration.
Some don't want to get rid of the WHOIS databases, though, instead anticipating that increasing pressure will trigger a re-work of the system to make it better.
Others, such as former AT&T exec Marilyn Cade, think that now isn't the time to be considering closedown or change. Instead, more research should be done into WHOIS abuse to discover how best to serve the many different kinds of people and companys registering domains.
WHOIS, much like e-mail, is an age-old Internet relic that comes from a time when the Internet was almost (but not quite) considered a network of trustworthy users. E-mail has, quite clearly, some massive problems coping in the modern age, but it's still here.
It stands to reason, then, that WHOIS won't be going anywhere any time soon. Just like e-mail, it's prone to abuse. But again, just like e-mail, it's too useful to axe.
HEXUS links
AP article in the Sydney Morning Herald.
