ICANN’s New WHOIS Online Accuracy Reporting System

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is seeking one or more providers to assist ICANN in the development, operation, and maintenance of the WHOIS Online Accuracy Reporting System.

Every year, millions of individuals, businesses, organizations and governments register domain names. Each one must provide identifying and contact information which may include: name, address, email, phone number, and administrative and technical contacts. This information is often referred to as “WHOIS data.”

ICANN‘s Affirmation of Commitments (AoC) requires ICANN to “implement measures to maintain timely, unrestricted and public access to accurate and complete WHOIS information…” To do that, registrars and registries provide public access to data on registered names. Anyone can use WHOIS to search the databases and identify the registered name holder or “registrant” of a generic domain name.

The WHOIS Online Accuracy Reporting System (“Accuracy Reporting System”) is a project mandated by ICANN‘s Board of Directors that will:

• Proactively identify potentially inaccurate gTLD WHOIS contact data through random sampling;
• Forward potentially inaccurate records to gTLD registrars for investigation and follow-up;
• Publicly report on the resulting actions; and
• In future iterations, enable ICANN‘s Contractual Compliance Department to examine the potential accuracy of Whois data in the course of enforcement of Whois accuracy obligations of registrars and registries;

to encourage improved accuracy. More information on WHOIS is available here.

ICANN is seeking proposals through this RFP from vendors or service providers that can perform one or more of the functions for the Accuracy Reporting System. ICANN expects that it will likely contract with several vendors to perform the wide range of services called for in this RFP.

The goals of the Accuracy Reporting System are to:

• Provide transparency into the accuracy of generic domain name WHOIS records
• Derive data to inform changes to the WHOIS policy
• Determine whether recent contractual changes (such as those relating to WHOIS validation and verification) and policy changes (such as the new consensus policy requiring “thick WHOIS”) result in measurable increases in accuracy levels
• Enhance ICANN‘s contractual compliance activities through access to automated tools to examine certain data elements included in WHOIS records.

The objective of this RFP is to identify one or more vendors to provide services, software or data to support ICANN‘s development of the Accuracy Reporting System, to provide the following functionality, as described in greater detail in the RFP:

• WHOIS Parser – to standardize the format of WHOIS data records collected from gTLD registrars and registries;
• Global Validation and Verification Services – to examine WHOIS contact data, including postal address, email, telephone and registrant identity;
• Study Design and Delivery Services – to define the parameters of the statistical analysis to be deployed in the Accuracy Reporting System, and to perform the defined statistical analysis study and reporting services; and
• Visual Communication Services – to create and design innovative visual communication solutions to display the complex statistical data output from these ongoing studies in a user-friendly manner.

For additional information and instructions for submitting responses please see http://whois.icann.org/sites/default/files/files/online-accuracy-reporting-rfp-16may14-en.zip [ZIP, 2.09 MB].

Proposals should be submitted to <whois-rfp@icann.org> by 23:59 UTC on 6 June 2014. Submissions must be provided using supplied templates, supplemented by additional information, as necessary.