Second report from Tunisia

[Harold Feld]

Kathy, thanks for your hard work and the report back to the consticuency.

The registrar/registry position has been evolving for awhile now.  They
know their customers want privacy and that their hope for big bucks here
is to make the medium friendly for individual registrants.

Has anyone surveyed business interests outside the business
consticuency?  Over the years, I have heard complaints from businesses
about how the nature of WHOIS creates problems for those seeking to
register new product names or merger-related names.  Since this is
financially sensitive information, businesses want to keep the
information of registration proprietary (apparently, it is a big deal if
you notice that drug company X has registered "blah-o-cide.com" because
it signals that blah-o-cide is close to FDA approval, or some such).  My
understanding is that they use various dummies and holding corps to get
around this.  Has anyone done any research in this area?

Harold

KathrynKL at AOL.COM wrote:

>Re: WHOIS Workshop http://www.icann.org/carthage/whois-workshop-agenda.htm
>
>The registry constituency representative said that he supported privacy in WHOIS; the two registrar representatives both said they supported privacy in WHOIS (and Network Solutions gave several examples of stalking, etc, sent to them by their customers).   The At Large Rep said that all information should be voluntary (registrant, admin contact, and tech contact).
>