Home»Documents»IAB Correspondence, Reports, and Selected Documents»2016»IAB comment on "Revised Proposed Implementation of GNSO Thick Whois Consensus Policy Requiring Consistent Labeling and Display of RDDS (Whois) Output for All gTLDs
On 7 December 2016, the IAB responded to the ICANN call for public comments on the Revised Proposed Implementation of GNSO Thick Whois Consensus Policy Requiring Consistent Labeling and Display of RDDS (Whois) Output for All gTLDs:
Thank you for the opportunity to provide public comment on the "Revised Proposed Implementation of GNSO Thick WHOIS Consensus Policy Requiring Consistent Labeling and Display of RDDS (WHOIS) Output for All gTLDs." RDAP was developed within the IETF, by technical contributors whose affiliations include registries, registrars, and other WHOIS users and providers, to resolve the technical shortcomings of WHOIS. Given the well known issues with WHOIS, the IAB strongly encourages ICANN, Registrars, and Registries to begin experimenting with RDAP as soon as possible. In particular, the IAB recommends the removal of all barriers to the deployment and use of RDAP. WHOIS lacks support for authenticated access and differentiated responses. Since RDAP can make use of HTTP authentication, the IAB believes that authenticated access should be one of the features Registrars and Registries investigate through experimentation. We do not believe that authenticated access will necessarily incur more costs for any users, and we hope that experimentation will demonstrate that to be the case. The IAB understands that ICANN policy development is needed to determine which registration data ought to be available to the public and which registration data deserves additional protection. We hope experimentation with RDAP can provide insight to that policy development work. Finally, the IAB strongly encourages the use of RDAP only over TLS in order to offer server authentication as well as protection for registration data. Respectfully submitted for the IAB, Andrew Sullivan IAB Chair