A translation (was Re: An update from the ICANN ISPCP meeting...)

Sat Oct 25 12:00:14 UTC 2014

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 03:13:48PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote:
> Though I've no doubt someone out there imagines improving the quality
> of the database would help with spam I tend to doubt it.

It might.  So would removing the farce of 'private' domain registration.

What would also help is removing the antiquated and byzantine boilerplate
adhesions that result when one queries WHOIS data.  And finally, what
would help is dumping daily snapshots of all WHOIS data so that it's
possible to just grab the entire thing in one compressed (text? XML?) file
with a single rsync/wget -- with the minor caveat that such snapshots will
always lag behind actual data.

(Some folks will claim that this will result in increased spam to
domain owners.  This is false.  First, the spammers already have all
those addresses and are busy selling them to each other and using them
when they see fit.  Second, domain registrations are not a particularly
rich source of addresses, as the subset of email addresses which are
mentioned in them is small compared to the set of all email addresses.)

---rsk