Michael Barrow writes:

Who said anything about usage charges? It looks like the proposed work mentioned by David Holtzman is to control _abuse_ of the whois service.

and Derek Balling writes:

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.

Given that NSI is sitting on what Gordon Cook has suggested is "the motherload of all databases", including full contact information for a large percentage of all Internet engineers on the planet, NSI has every incentive to limit access to that database and bide its time hoping that it will eventually be able to commercially exploit that database. And this pending legislation...

H.R.2652. Collections of Information Antipiracy Act. Creates property right in databases of information, even if public domain information. Introduced by Rep. Coble (R-NC). Approved by House on voice vote on May 19. Referred to Senate Judiciary Committee. [ from http://www.epic.org/privacy/bill_track.html ]

will only help that cause. Recent NSI moves to limit "abuse" of whois, where "abuse" will be defined however NSI finds it convenient to define the term, could be interpreted as "being Internet-friendly", or as trying to constrain their operating costs and make more money for their shareholders, or as a means of maintaining their control over the collection of information by preventing others from assembling reasonably accurate replications. Application of Occam's razor to determine which of these three interpretations is more likely, given NSI's historical behavior in the exercise of its monopoly power, is left as an exercise to the reader. As an aside, we've had similar problems with ARIN, which doesn't make its database available for ftp (even though APNIC and RIPE do, though I believe at least one of them doesn't provide the email addresses in the contact records) and refuses to provide copies. We needed a copy of portions of the information for a (non-spamming) in-house application and couldn't get it. But at least ARIN is run as a public trust with voting members who can choose to adjust policy. Perhaps they'll start providing copies in the future. Bruce Hahne hahne@netcom.com [I don't work for Netcom]