Thick .com Whois policy delayed
ICANN’s GNSO Council has deferred a decision on whether Verisign should have to thicken up the Whois database for .com and its other gTLDs.
A motion to begin an official Policy Development Process on thick Whois was kicked down the road by councilors this afternoon at the request of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency.
It will now be discussed at the Council’s face-to-face meeting in Costa Rica in March. But there were also calls from registries to delay a decision for up to a year, calling the PDP a “distraction”.
Verisign’s .com registry contract and the standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement are currently being renegotiated by ICANN, both of which could address Whois in some way.
Today, all contracted gTLD registries have to operate a thick Whois, except Verisign with its .com, .net, .jobs, etc, where the registrars manage the bulk of the Whois data.
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Just to make it clear as I did on the council call, Verisign itself supports the idea of the PDP if the GNSO community wants it. The rest of the registries, however, believe that we should not have PDPs that focus on the activities of only 1 or very few entities (in this case registries) especially when there are so many other pressing items on the GNSO community’s agenda.
Thanks Jeff.
I did report on Verisign’s position in earlier coverage linked to in the above post.
http://domainincite.com/fight-brewing-over-thick-com-whois/