This is a much-belated report from the WHOIS Steering Committees telephone conference two weeks ago. For the ALAC, both Wendy Seltzer and I participated.
Most time was spent on prioritizing issues from the staff manager's report on WHOIS. Among constituencies, there seems to be relatively widespread consensus to consider "port 43 data-mining" as the most urgent problem. A proposed "solution" to this which is floating around informally would consist in shutting down port 43 for the general public, and leaving web-based access available to the general public -- possibly with "anti-mining technology" like what, e.g., GoDaddy already has in place: You have to type a number into a web form; that number is presented to you as an image in an obscure font which is hoped to be hard to read for computers. Also, port 43 might remain open for privileged data users, such as registrars (who need WHOIS in the transfers context), or intellectual property holders.
For ALAC, we named the data collection issues as a priority; Wendy made the point that just limiting the disclosure of data would continue to give some players full access to information, while the general public would have to jump through cumbersome mechanisms, and might not even understand what kinds of data about them are being made available to privileged parties.
An expanded written version of some of these remarks is available from the whois-sc list archive.
