Actually, I think this issue dates back to when Network Solutions thought they "owned" the database, and had some plans to sell it. There was a lot of pushback to that idea, which they eventually dropped. But they have still resisted letting anyone else have the full database. I don't think they are actually concerned so much with abuse as they are with trying to maintain or establish a proprietary control over the database. Of course, "abuse prevention" is a good cover for proprietary control. --Dean At 11:20 AM 9/2/98 -0500, Derek Balling wrote:

...

Who said anything about usage charges? It looks like the proposed work mentioned by David Holtzman is to control _abuse_ of the whois service. Otherwise, the load on whois will grow without bounds and we'd eventually have to pay more in registration fees. Of course, that's just my figurin' and nothing official...

True, that's what his statement appears to say, however, who is to define "abuse" of the whois service?

As an example, a company I worked for a while back wanted to generate, on their statistics reports for their customers' web sites, who each domain was who was hitting their page, and who it belonged to (e.g. someone looking just at "ora.com" might not correlate that to "O'Reilly and Associates"). What we had then asked InterNIC for was a means of getting that data WITHOUT using whois. (We knew it was readily available, and publicly accessible, but wanted to avoid beating on the whois server to get it when it came time to generate reports). The people we talked to at InterNIC essentially told us to pound salt. My superior at the time had mentioned that we had two ways of going about this, the "net-friendly" way, and the "brute-force" way, and that InterNIC was forcing us to use the brute force way which could cause their servers undue load.

Was this company "an abuser" because they wanted to do lookups of a useful nature? (And yes, they put in caching and such so they wouldn't be querying every domain every time.) Granted, I would define someone harvesting the whois database for email addresses an abuser, but since I feel the abuse use had "valid purpose", that it shouldn't be categorized as abuse. I bet InterNIC would claim it was though.

It's a customer service issue... We are all (I assume) customers of InterNIC. We pay them money for domain name registrations, and they are in turn supposed to provide reliable whois service (among other things, of course). If they're finding that load on the whois server is higher than they expect, they might consider (a) finding WHY it is that high? are there people like my old employer out there doing whois requests to get a single field from a number of sites, (b) allow others to volunteer to host the data and serve up requests.

Just my $0.02 worth, everyone else's mileage is sure to vary.

Derek

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