Partial WHOIS Primer

Here’s a first fragment of a draft for a WHOIS policy primer. This one’s a walk-through of the registrar accreditation agreements (actually, there are two of these, with small differences), which is hopefully at least a bit more understandable than the agreements themselves. Missing bits: A review of the .name appendix to the RAA (which is currently missing from the ICANN web site), which may contain changes to query-based access, and an overview of registries’ WHOIS provisions. In any event, the most important policies (at least from a privacy point of view…) are contained in the RAA: Even the thick registries basically make the same query-based access available as registrars (with .name as an exception), with the same non-restrictions on use of the data, and, possibly, advanced query possibilities. Bulk access to thick registries’ whois data is more limited than with registrars. So I hope that this is useful even in its current incomplete state. I’ll add more when I find the time. That means, in particular, not this week.