2. Introduction

The Internet is used for information exchange and communication between its users. It can only be effective as such if users are able to find each other's addresses. Therefore the Internet benefits from an adequate White Pages Service, i.e., a directory service offering (Internet) address information related to people and organizations.

This document describes the way in which the Internet White Pages Service (from now on abbreviated as IWPS) is best exploited using today's experience, today's protocols, today's products and today's procedures.

Experience [2] has shown that a White Pages Service based on self- registration of users or on centralized servers tends to gather data in a haphazard fashion, and, moreover, collects data that ages rapidly and is not kept up to date.

The most vital attempts to establish the IWPS are based on models with distributed (local) databases each holding a manageable part of the IWPS information. Such a part mostly consists of all relevant IWPS information from within a particular organization or from within an Internet service provider and its users. On top of the databases there is a directory services protocol that connects them and provides user access. Today X.500 is the most popular directory services protocol on the Internet, connecting the address information of about 1,5 million individuals and 3,000 organizations. Whois++ is the second popular protocol. X.500 and Whois++ may also be used to interconnect other information than only IWPS information, but here we only discuss the IWPS features.

Note: there are other, not interconnected, address databases on the Internet that are also very popular for storing address information about people. "Ph" is a popular protocol for use with a stand-alone database. There are over 300 registered Ph databases on the Internet. Interconnection of databases however, is highly recommended for an IWPS, since it ensures that data can be found. Hence Ph as it is now is not considered to be a good candidate for an IWPS, but future developments may change this situation (see section 12).

Currently X.500 must be recommended as the directory services protocol to be used for the IWPS. However, future technology may make it possible to use other protocols as well or instead.

Since many people think that X.500 on the Internet will be replaced by other protocols in the near future, it should be mentioned here that currently LDAP is seen as the surviving component of today's implementations and the main access protocol for tomorrow's directory services. As soon as new technology (that will probably use LDAP) becomes available and experiments show that they work, this document will be updated.

A summary of X.500 products can be found in [14] (a document that will be updated regularly).

The sections 3-7 below contain recommendations related to the publication of information in the IWPS that are independent of a directory services protocol. The sections 8-11 discuss X.500 specific issues. In section 12 some future developments are discussed as they can be foreseen at the time of writing this document.