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ICANN Punts on WHOIS Privacy Proposal
An anonymous reader writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has essentially put off consideration of a proposal that would have dissolved a requirement that domain name registrars collect and display personal information about people who register Web site names. Privacy activists said the WHOIS database has become a data-mining dream for marketers and spammers, to say nothing of stalkers and harassers. Companies representing some of the world's biggest brand names appear to have prevailed, arguing that any change to the current system would interfere with law enforcement investigations and trademark disputes. In the end, ICANN voted 7-17 to table the issue in favor of further studies on the privacy impact of the WHOIS database."
I can have a privately listed phone number, why can't I have a privately listed domain? I can speak anonymously by publishing pamphlets, why can't I speak anonymously by publishing to the internet? More importantly, why is your need to 'track down the owners' more important than the owners' privacy?
Try running a non-profit from your home to offer mental health support. Death threats on the internet may be a dime a dozen, but when it comes to mental health issues... well, some of those threats are more genuine than others. Do you think $5 is going to keep someone from calling me on the phone 50 times a day or coming to my house and stalking me?
The registrar has a business relationship with me and needs to know who I am. You don't. If you need to contact me, I have an email and mail forwarding set up with my registrar.
This discussion is heavily slanted toward the pro-regulation crowd. The moderators seem to be modding up posts based on the position they take in the debate rather than the value of the points they are making. I would think that a community for geeks would have a better understanding of this issue, and would have more people who are sympathetic to the interests of private individuals who have domain names for non-commercial reasons.
There are a large number of straw men that are raised constantly by supporters of whois accuracy regulation. Not one holds up to objective analysis.
1. No one is talking about getting rid of Whois. Whois was originally voluntary. You could publish as much or as little information as you wanted in it. Later, it was changed to make publication of names, addresses, and telephone numbers mandatory. If this vote was successful it would become voluntary again. This is not the same thing as taking down the service.
2. Criminals and spammers are not going to publish accurate information in whois. There is no way to force the data to be accurate regardless of what the regulations are. So the regulations mostly impact well meaning, honest people, not criminal groups.
3. Businesses want you to know how to contact them. No legitimate business is going to keep it's whois information private. The regulations do not effect businesses or organizations, who would publish contact information regardless of whether or not they were required to, they effect individual, non-commercial domain holders.
4. You do not need DNS Whois to resolve technical, security, or legal issues with a domain. Its convenient, but if the data is wrong or not present, you can contact the ISP that is responsible for the IP address the computer in question is using. DNS Whois is never necessary. Most kinds of Internet crimes can be committed without a domain name, and so DNS whois is obviously not sufficient to investigate those cases. How does the RIAA prosecute P2P users, who are publishing on the Internet without a domain name? The argument that its ok to have an anonymous sub domain but its not ok to have an anonymous primary domain also does not make sense. If you have a problem with an anonymous primary domain you can contact the ISP responsible for the IP address the computer in question is using, just as you are forced to do if there is no domain name being used.
5. Yes, proxy services are available, but they are expensive, and this expense ought to serve some sort of legitimate purpose. If the purpose of this regulation isn't fighting spammers or criminals or making sure businesses disclose their locations, than what is it and are we willing to spend $9 per domain to serve it?
6. Individuals who use the Internet for noncommercial reasons are not interested in eating cake. We don't want dymanic dns records hosted on a sub-domain. We don't want to use hosting services. We want domains, and we've been able to use domains for non commercial purposes without publishing personal contact information for most of the history of the Internet! The response "if you don't like it use XYZ" is not acceptable. The people who advocate that people be required to publish their personal information in the whois database must defend the need for and value of that regulation, and not simply offer that those who disagree go somewhere else!
The bottom line is that supporters of these rules are motivated by misinformation, private interests, or outright authoritarianism.
The misinformed are those who like doing whois lookups on domains and assume that this information should always be required to be there in a form they expect simply because it is often there and often useful. This is a bit like assuming that personal homepages should have a terms of service agreement and a "contact us" page because lots of sites do and they like to use them.
The private interests are those like the RIAA and other IP interests, who wish to ensure that honest, well meaning private individuals who use d