Whois may die. I’ve used it in the past to determine who owns a web site. I’ve even been frustrated that a very negative web site had a privacy blocker in place so I could not determine who ran the site. At the same time, I have the same protection on most of my domains. I no longer get the massive amounts of spam now that I have changed the protected address.

IMO, ICANN may as well die. Its a collective of people who represent interests of companies or activists without much concern for what they should… A high functioning Internet. They hit similar deadlocks regularly. Everyone has their lines drawn in the sand such that nothing can move. I’m surprised whenever they make a decision.

Marilyn Cade … called the sunset proposal “an emotional overreaction that somehow got crystalized into an option…” Whois May Be Scrapped to Break Deadlock

The original intent of the system was to provide a way for exchanging contact information for resolving issues. I’d image technical folks involved with DNS, email, and web sites still use it to some degree. Should it disappear today, DNS would still convert an IP to a host.domain name. Hopefully that domain has a web site who will tell me who to contact?