Difference between bulk access and individual access (Was: Policy for an Internet registry [EUreg #2656]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 06:19:19PM +0200,
 Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote 
 a message of 20 lines which said:

> I'm a lazy beginner in P3P and I would like to know if there is an
> already existing policy file for an Internet domain
> registry. 

According to our lawyer, there is an important legal difference
between allowing public access to individual data (in the whois
context, allowing the public to query the contacts of a domain name,
giving the exact domain name) and bulk access (having the whole
database at your disposition or a substantial part of it, may be
through fuzzy search criteria such as the ability the find all domains
matching a given string).

In the French registry, at the present time, we therefore have a
public whois (anyone can retrieve personal information from anywhere)
but no bulk access at all (the database is not transferred and we
patched the RIPE-NCC whois server to disallow some privacy-invading
search features).

Is there a way to express that in P3P? I plan to have several
STATEMENT, with different RECIPIENT and expressing in the CONSEQUENCES
element that one STATEMENT is for bulk access and the other for
individual access only.

Received on Friday, 16 August 2002 04:05:52 UTC