WHOIS :: A view into ICANN Policy and Politics
My comment to the GNSO-WHOIS-Study mailing list for the forthcoming report "WHOIS Study Group: Report to the GNSO Council, Recommendation on further studies of WHOIS" as some part of VIEWPOINT #1 -- NO FURTHER STUDIES OF WHOIS SHOULD BE INITIATED AT THIS TIME. We're summing up and us "nonists" (registrars, registries, non-commercial users) are drafting viewpoint #1. Enjoy watching policy at wonk. Oh. Don't forget to ask yourself, "Self, what has this got to do with privacy?"
The existing policy is the policy Peter Deutsch described in 1973 [1] and maintained without modification of policy on data collection, or data publication, until Ken Harrenstein, Mary Stahl and Jake Feinler wrote the NICNAME/WHOIS specification in 1985 [2]. That is, the current ICANN policy is Defense Communications Agency policy of 1973, restated in 1985, for a restricted access network.
Late in the (UTC) day on 24 February 2008, Pakistan Telecom (AS 17557) began advertising a small part of YouTube's (AS 36561) assigned network. Old hands will recognize this as, fundamentally, the same problem as the infamous AS 7007 from 1997, a more recent ConEd mistake of early 2006 and even TTNet's Christmas Eve gift of 2004. The root of the problem is the lack of a chain of authentication of IP assignments (so-BGP, IRV) from the "root" of the tree, and what is "accident" today is an "operation" tomorrow.
This year Srizbi, a system consisting of 300,000 nodes, and last year's Storm, a system consisting of 100,000 nodes, inject economic payloads accounting for more than half of the global SMTP payload, and smaller systems inject similar economic payloads via HTTP and other protocols. Last year and this year still smaller systems began to use the DNS to deliver economic payloads, coordinated with systems injecting economic payloads in SMTP. The temporal properties of the later system are novel and interesting.
Rational criminal enterprise may use entries in the DNS associated with SMTP payload for as little as an hour from initial use to abandonment, targeting to the timezone for user mail dequeue, processing, and actual reading. The tempo and scope of acts which effect either the operational stability of the net in the large, or end users is vastly different from the persistent, and static unprivileged use of a trademark in the DNS, or the persistent, and static use of a non-mark in the DNS to further some unlawful act unrelated to trademark misuse. While these unprivileged and unlawful uses of the DNS, coordinated with use of SMTP and other protocols, or in isolation, have transformed in the past ten years to optimize revenue extraction, resulting in highly dynamic systems, the policy of ICANN relating to the DNS has not, and remains tied to WHOIS:43, a model for a locus of control of the DNS that was obsolete (aka "standardized") in 1985.
The trend of divergence of operational art by rational criminal economic enterprises and fundamental ICANN policy response will continue, as long as the present situation continues.
The ICANN stakeholder model has decayed, the ASO and the PSO fictions are dead. The GNSO stakeholder model has decayed, the BC and ISPC fictions are dead. Substantive policy issues addressing the technical stability of the internet, as well as the development of predatory economic activities, where territorial jurisdiction and public law are either unavailable, or profoundly difficult to apply as basic tools, cannot be developed within the decayed stakeholder model while two of the six GNSO stakeholder constituencies are a proxy for a third, the Intellectual Property Constituency. No "study" of WHOIS will change this. No "study" of WHOIS will displace the identification of trademark interests with the interests of network access and transit providers, or the interests of network transactional goods and services producers and consumers. No "study" of WHOIS will displace the identification of petty, per-domain dysfunction, with the interests of producers and consumers of the network address resource, or the interests of network protocol infrastructure.
No "study" of WHOIS is going to ungame ICANN, and if uncorrected, other gaming interests will exploit this stasis until some larger disequilibrium occurs.
We can thank, and dismiss, Vint Cerf, Peter Deutsch, Jake Feinler, and Nancy Neigus for getting the Official Host Name list to happen, and for it to be available on-line, for the last 35 years, but it is time to recognize that ICANN does not coordinate technical policy for MILNET, nor does it properly inherit without modification, the technical policy of the Defense Communications Agency, and it would be rather imprudent for the institutional successor to the DCA, or for "law enforcement", to presume that time and technology stopped when Leonid Brezhev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Andropov ran the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Footnotes:
[1] RFC 606 " Host Names On-line"
"Since the NIC has responsibility for maintaining the official
list, lt seems appropriate for them to maintain an on-line file,
accessible to anyone ..."
[2] RFC 954 " NICNAME/WHOIS"
"DCA requests that each individual with a directory on an ARPANET or
MILNET host, who is capable of passing traffic across the DoD
Internet, be registered in the NIC WHOIS Database. MILNET TAC users
must be registered in the database."
