ICANN's Plan To End Commercial Website Anonymity Creates Real Problems

An anonymous reader notes that ICANN is closing the comment period for its plan to prevent owners of commercial websites from keeping their personal details out of a site's public-facing registration information. Digital rights groups are taking the opportunity to explain how real harm can result from this decision. The Online Abuse Prevention Initiative posted an open letter to ICANN pointing out the rise of doxing and swatting: "Our concern about doxing is not hypothetical. Randi Harper, a technologist, anti-harassment activist, and founder of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, was swatted based on information obtained from the Whois record for her domain. The only reason law enforcement did not draw their weapons and break down Harper’s door was that she had previously warned her local police department about swatting."

Cathy Gellis at Popehat refers to the situation surrounding Charles Carreon, the man who antagonized The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman's webcomic) and issued legal threats to those who called him out. "In that case the critic had selected a domain incorporating Carreon's name in order to best get his point about Carreon's thuggery across, which the First Amendment and federal trademark law allowed him to do. ... Unfortunately, the registrar immediately caved to Carreon's pressure and disclosed the critic's identifying information, thereby eviscerating the privacy protection the critic expected to have, and depended on, for his commentary."

Comments

OAPI is a Scam

[Kunedog]

Randi Harper is a notorious harrasser and citing her in relation to anything (especially harrassment prevention) seriously damages the credibility of your cause.

Re:OAPI is a Scam

[Crashmarik]

Seriously Ms. Harper has quite the history of censorship and harassment
http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/hi...

Or rather incompetent censorship seeing as her twitter blocker software runs guilt by association.

Re:OAPI is a Scam

[Anonymous Coward]

The blocker is incredibly effective. It blocks all forms of garbage I would be alright with never ever seeing.

But that's beside the damn point.

There are MANY websites that are hiding behind little more than an anonymous proxy account (eg at godaddy) and cloudflare (to hide the real machine), there's sites like 4chan, sites that harbor childporn, sites that traffic in pirated films, games, comic books, anime, etc, you name it. This is the kind of stuff the DMCA safe harbor clause was not intended to "save" action on.

But I think what we need to do is address the Swatting problem first. I had an idea for this years ago, but I decided to not persue it and let the domains expire because the last thing I wanted was to elevate my notoriety to where I'd actually be scare to keep developing it.

Here's how we can address the Swatting question.
1) Improve Enhanced 911 service.
Require that all calls to 911 have an actual traceable origin. This means that both wirelines and wireless calls are geolocated to the subscribers premises unless the device says otherwise. Calls that require EMT should be treated as they do now. Calls that involve law enforcement (eg guns/bombs present) should attempt to verify the authenticity of the call.
2) Calls that are "spoofed", eg have no real phone number, or are registered to VoIP services (eg Skype) should be treated as suspicious and First Responders should not rush into situations guns drawn.

Like the easy solution is to just keep a public "SWATTING Target" database, have people who are high profile targets (Eg Twitch.TV streamers) register themselves, their name/alias and address, and which "unit" of the building they stream their games from. Basically the website would go "If you receive a 911 call to THIS address, check if the stream is live and if it is, phone this number to verify that it's a hoax."

It's not a perfect solution, but it prevents the potential Swatting that would get someone killed.

Re:OAPI is a Scam

[BitZtream]

$10 says Randi Harper is the one who submitted the story

Straw man?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

The problem, IMO, is that .com(.*) sites are not exclusively commercial, and other TLDs can be commercial. If you want to run a commercial site that takes money (not advertising revenue) from sales - you should provide publicly accessible, verified, identification and contact details.

If your site doesn't sell things then you should be able to protect your details from the public.

You should also be able to not be liable for people speaking their mind, within limitations - but that's another complex issue.

OAPI = Harassment Group

[sethstorm]

Given that it's been associated with people that harass under the banner of "anti-harassment", their claims are impossible to believe. The only reason that such "anti-harassment" groups exist is for the coordinated silencing of individuals that present uncomfortable, narrative-breaking facts.

The bulk of their harassment claims end up being disproven, while their harassment of individuals is well-proven (see Chelsea "ZQ" van Valkenberg, R.H., and others).

Re:OAPI = Harassment Group

[dave420]

Apparently letting people close their eyes is harassment. Weird. I guess remote controls are, too, as you can use them to change channels. This level of knee-jerk reaction from adults who honestly sound like scalded children is heartbreakingly pathetic.

Re:This is particularly concerning

[Demonoid-Penguin]

This is particularly concerning for organisations who speak the truth about Islam. The "religion of peace" has a habit of violence towards those who expose it's true nature.

Please don't post stupid. There is no one Islam any-more than there is one Christianity or Buddhism (or Hindu). If all Christians were "true" Christians (literally interpreted all the Bible) there'd be a lot more public stonings (throwing rocks that is). Religion is stupid full-stop - but until the world is solely occupied by those that don't need religion we have a problem. You and your broad brush of hate trying to pass as truth - which invariably hides a fundamentalist religious agenda - are part of the problem.

And The Editors Know It Too

[Kunedog]

What's appalling is that the /. editors must be aware of her history by now. It's been pointed out repeatedly in the comments of multiple stories posted to the front page (including OAPI's founding). They're exploiting serious issues to try to build publicity and goodwill for hypocritical, attention-seeking "activists" who clearly deserve the opposite.

Re:And The Editors Know It Too

[ctid]

Randi Harper has done an excellent job of bringing to the wider Internet's attention ICANN's plan. I know I had not heard about it until I read the page that she set up.

You can't dismiss her just because she set up ggautoblocker.
 

Useless plan

[aaaaaaargh!]

This plan would perhaps make limited sense if companies would actually answer emails and snail mail. They often don't, especially not in the problematic cases when anonymity could also be a nuisance. No, you will not suddenly be able to contact the poker company on Malta registered by a strawman in order to tell them that they should kindly delete your credit card information. It's not going to happen.

The whole construction is useless. A de-anonymization will not give any advantage to customers of businesses, it will online increase online harassment, particularly of semi-commercial bloggers and media, and increase the amount of spurious legal letters sent to small businesses by copyright and patent trolls.

Since you can always get the information...

[tlambert]

Since you can always get the information by showing legal cause and obtaining a court order, I really don't see what use de-anonymizing domain name registration serves, other than to make it less expensive to obtain large amounts of information for relatively little cost, as opposed to having to be sure enough of something that you can justify the court order.

The ICANN proposal as it stands is pretty stupid, and Doug Brent would likely have never had his name associated with it while he was COO, and Jon Postel sure as *hell* would not want his name associated with it.