auDA have confirmed today that there will be a Whois policy at some point
this year. Possibly later in the year.

I suggest it will be open for Public comments and opinions can be submitted
at that time.

Cheers

Marty


-----Original Message-----
From: Dirk Hunter [mailto:DirkH§stjohnqld.com.au] 
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2005 4:16 PM
To: dns§dotau.org
Subject: RE: [DNS] Re: Whois & Spam

A number of people (myself included) suggested this in the 2003 WHOIS policy
review (http://www.auda.org.au/reviews/whois-2003/).

The response was (from Response to Public Comments, 20/08/03)

"There is no evidence to suggest that registrant email addresses are being
harvested from the WHOIS database for spamming purposes, and in any case
auDA believes that the best way to manage this risk is by imposing WHOIS
query limits and bulk access restrictions. 

auDA notes comments about various technical solutions, such as email
masking, one-time-use email addresses or contact via web forms. For the
reasons given above, we do not consider it appropriate to introduce such
measures at this time. However, we will monitor the development and
implementation of different technologies by industry providers in other
domain spaces for possible application in .au."