From: Bennett Oprysa 
Sent: Wednesday, 31 August 2005 11:58 PM
To: jo.lim@auda.org.au
Subject: whois policy

Jo,

comments regarding the whois policy.

I think the policy is generally correct but could do with some adjustments. 
I would first like to clarify that we consider the whois service to be 
essentially a technical service, not a legal or marketing service. Therefore, 
whois output must show nameservers and the domain status as well as a 
technical contact person, and not much else.

In case of legal disputes, complainants should be able to get full contact 
information for a domain from auDA. This also applies to law enforcement 
agencies, if they have a valid reason, they can get all such info from auDA.

I see no reason why the registrant or admin contact needs to be visible to 
anybody other that the registrar of record, and this is in fact how the 
Enetica whois service is configured. We only publicly show the technical 
contact for a domain, not the registrant, admin or billing contacts.

I would however like to be able to show full contact details for the technical 
contact, ie phone, fax and postal address as well.

id.au domains in particular should have minimal contact info displayed, we 
strongly suggest that nothing more than the technical contact be displayed 
for id.au domains.

I don't consider any of the reasons given for showing the creation or expiry 
date to be worthwhile.

A separate and fairly important issue is the displaying of a reseller name 
and optionally their URL with each domain. This has been discussed for a long 
time, I think it would help registrants greatly if they could easily identify 
the reseller they have their domain service through and therefore contacting 
them directly. This may take a bit more time to implement, but it should be 
perfectly achievable by next July.

Regards,
Bennett Oprysa
Enetica Pty Ltd.