WHOIS Task Forces 1 & 2
18 January, 2005 - MinutesATTENDEES:
GNSO Constituency representatives:
Registrars constituency - Jordyn Buchanan - Co-Chair
gTLD Registries constituency - David Maher
Commercial and Business Users constituency - Marilyn Cade
Commercial and Business Users constituency - David Fares
Internet Service and Connectivity Providers constituency - Antonio Harris
Registrars constituency - Tom Keller
Registrars constituency - Paul Stahura
Intellectual Property Interests Constituency - Steve Metalitz
Intellectual Property Interests Constituency - Niklas Lagergren,
At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) liaisons - Thomas Roessler
ICANN Staff Manager: Barbara Roseman
GNSO Secretariat: Glen de Saint Géry
Absent:
gTLD Registries constituency: - Jeff Neuman - Co-Chair - apologies
Registrars constituency - Tim Ruiz
Nominating committee representative - Amadeu Abril l Abril
Intellectual Property Interests Constituency - Jeremy Banks
Non Commercial Users Constituency - Marc Schneiders
Non Commercial Users Constituency - Milton Mueller - apologies
Non Commercial Users Constituency - Kathy Kleiman
Internet Service and Connectivity Providers constituency - Maggie Mansourkia - apologies
At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) liaisons - Wendy Seltzer
MP3 Recording
Agenda
1. Discuss some of the proposals from Marilyn Cade for additional outside input, and see what other people think are the appropriate steps to take for exploring models of tiered access
2. A short administrative discussion about our two outstanding proposals. Particularly, how to set up a meeting with ICANN staff for discussion of the National Privacy proposals.
3. Discuss how to proceed since we didn't get models of tiered access and our deadline has passed. Was this a useful idea, will it help progress the work or should we find another way to proceed ?
David Maher commented that CIRA made an interesting proposal for limiting information available to the the public and referred to the URL for the Canadian proposal that involved a "tiered access" approach.
http://www.cira.ca/en/Whois/whois_intro.html
Thomas Roessler : ALAC did submit a proposal last year, and there are some other historical submissions that seem on-topic. These can be resubmitted if necessary.
Jordyn Buchanan : That's good, and we should reflect on prior submissions. I recall there was one from Tom Keller and the registrars.
Tom Keller Keller: We could revisit the submission from last year.
Marilyn Cade : In the Business Constituency, we don't have consensus on tiered access. What we have consensus on is working on the issue and examining it. Along with the consideration of other forms of tiered access, the Business Constituency would like to see more examination of anonymizing services and .post. Post is supposed to have some kind of tiered access, though it's clearly not in place yet and is still in negotiation with ICANN. I'd like to ask any of the CCs if they are currently using any form of tiered access, and maybe look at other sponsored TLDs to see if they are using any form of tiered access.
Jordyn Buchanan: the intent of the solicitation of models is not to say that we bless the idea of tiered access, or to choose a specific implementation, we thought it would be helpful to be grounded in some specific ideas instead of going over the more general issues, which we seem to have a good sense of already. Also, we recognize that this is a very time-consuming task, so its equally valid to look at what others have already done in this space, including earlier submissions and existing CC or gTLDs activities.
Marilyn Cade: regardless of how many contributions we get from members of the Task Force, we need to do this data gathering and informing ourselves of what others are doing. For instance, originally .name was going to charge a $2 fee, but that ran into practical implementation difficulties with the credit card companies. These kinds of lessons are important to review.
Jordyn Buchanan: nothing to prevent us from doing both, and obviously value in trying to review internal models and existing models.
Thomas Roessler: Shouldn't let timing of getting proposals stop us from moving forward with our work. Shouldn't let bad actors, especially the worst of the bad actors guide all our decisions.
Marilyn Cade: In Cape Town, the registrars were clear that they didn't know who was using their anonymizer services, but it was also understood that about 30% of registrars now offer such a service. This would be a significant issue to explore and we should hear from registrars who offer the service and how it works for them.
Steve Metalitz: We may be talking past each other a bit. Anonymizer services many not be operating differently from tiered access, so it would be useful to look at how these operate. It seems important to look at how registrars who offer this kind of service, especially to see how they understand it fitting in with the RAA.
Tom Keller: Anonymizing services do create a kind of tier, limits the data to the registrar providing the service. We're talking about something a little different, tiers in the Whois, which would provide different data depending on which tier you qualify for. The current service doesn't really meet that requirement.
Paul Stahura: It's not consistent among registrars how to get to the other tier, in anonymized data, it's not consistent across all registrars how to get the hidden data.
Thomas Roessler: Part of the discussion is useful to see what models are available now, but another way to do this would be to discuss the policy issues in question. This does come to the question of who will provide the resources for doing this investigation, and it will require resources to pursue further.
Steve Metalitz: Good point about resources, and Tom Keller is also right that the different models would be useful to study because they're both right that it's not uniform across the registrars and to see how the different implementations work.
Paul Stahura: Happy to discuss our implementation, and there's also a financial incentive to the current model which should be explored.
Marilyn Cade: In doing this examination, we need to be cautious about asking for information that's publicly available. Not talking about pricing.
Jordyn Buchanan: Also sensitivity around uptake, might be regarded as confidential information.
Paul Stahura: Yes, there's confusion about uptake, including in the press where there was a certain reason why uptake looked high for a certain registrar, then the customer released the public whois on the names.
Tom Keller: Anonymizers don't really seem the answer to the whole Whois question. They are a service, but don't really get at the heart of the Whois policy and what we can change about it.
Jordyn Buchanan: People had questions about what was currently in place, and what we could look at to get more ideas about tiered access. Instead of opening up the broad scope of these anonymizing services as a task of the Task Force, maybe look at one, or a few of the services as possible input into the tiered access discussion. Within certain parameters, Enom seems willing to share some information with us, and that might be a starting point for further discussion of the anonymizing services as part of the larger discussion on tiered access, not as a subject for review by itself. Let me suggest that we go down that route, but also look at some other ideas that have been suggested. Cira, .post, .name are all good places to start. Is anyone aware of other TLDs that operate a tiered-access service?
Marilyn Cade: I think a couple of the Latin American cc's do and I can send an email to ask them if they do and if they'd discuss it with us.
Jordyn Buchanan: Maybe get these other groups to do a briefing with us, about their implementation and what seems relevant to the tiered-access models they use. We can arrange this briefing and do some outreach to find others who will participate. If any of you have contacts from TLD operators that you think would be useful for discussing tiered access. Perhaps David could reach out to the .post people, and I'll send an email to the .name people. Hopefully we can do this in a timely manner, but as we've seen, it can sometimes take a while to get everyone together. Once we have looked at these three services, plus the anonymizer services, that should give us some places to start.
Jordyn Buchanan: looks like Marc Schnieders has submitted that .DE has some differentiated access.
Thomas Roessler, Tom Keller, and others: looks like this is based on a differentiation between how you access the info, via port 43 or port 80. If you access the data via port 80 you have to click through an agreement on using the data. Port 43 only gives you very basic data.
Jordyn Buchanan: Well, this is another model that would be useful to look at. Let's see how expediently we can put together briefings on these different models.
Marilyn Cade: I had suggested we include the chair of the SSAC in our briefings.
Jordyn Buchanan: And what are your thoughts on the objective of including them?
Marilyn Cade: The SSAC provided a report on including different information in the display of data. Would be good to keep their perspective in mind. Also, with CRISP/IRIS coming to agreement on a standard for implementation, we probably also want to hear from the RIRs about tiered access.
Thomas Roessler: How relevant is the RIRs views on tiered access to our work. We have to work in a policy environment of gTLDs and the RIRs would seem to take us into a broader community discussion that is off-topic from where we need to put our energy. We're looking at a number of teleconferences and we need to use our time well.
Marilyn Cade: We shouldn't ignore other areas of work that are important for us. We're often told by people who want to restrict access to data that we can get the data from the RIR whois. I'm interested in how changes in the display of data in both areas will affect how we can get to data. A request for information from the Executive Directors of the RIRs would be very useful.
Thomas Roessler: Right now we seem to be in a limitless exercise of adding more input. We need to balance input with coming up with a policy. We can't follow every source of information.
Jordyn Buchanan: I see these various TLD briefings as being one call, if we can get everyone lined up, and get a brief 10-15 minute description of the various implementations along with some questions and answers. Having them back-to-back would be very useful, especially in getting at the nuances of differences between them.
Steve Metalitz: Would be useful to get a response from the RIRs, where they may have already implemented something like tiered access. It's a second-order question, where the first order is talking to people who have already implemented some kind of tiered access.
Jordyn Buchanan:Yes, should talk to people with concrete implementations of tiered access first. If there's some places where they have good ideas we may want to take that under advisement. As for SSAC, it might be more useful to have a dialogue with them when we're closer to having proposals.
Marilyn Cade: I agree, doesn't have to be now, can be later.
Planning ahead:
Jordyn Buchanan: Want to spend the last bit of the call on our two prior proposals: (most of the work seems to be for me and Jeff Neuman. )
a. first is improving consent. We've issued a call for constituency statements, which are due January 31, 2005. So far we don't have any in yet. No further update until then.
b. national privacy laws, staff made some comments and we thought it would be productive to have additional dialog to discuss their response.
Action: schedule call for this purpose with Senior staff and task force
Barbara Roseman, Jordyn Buchanan, Jeff Neuman
Barbara Roseman: Yes, Paul Verhoef also said he wanted to get this scheduled, so let's see if we can get it done. Ideally, during a regular call.
Marilyn Cade: look at scheduling keeping the ICANN meeting in Argentina in mind.
Action: explore calendar and see what the task force will review for the Argentina meetings.
Glen, Jordyn Buchanan, Jeff Neuman
Thanks to Barbara Roseman's notes, these minutes are so detailed.
Jordyn Buchanan thanked everyone for their presence and participation.
The call ended at 12:00 noon EST, 18:00 CET
Next Whois Task Force 1/2 Call: 25 January 2005
see: GNSO calendar
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