urgent alert for Council members

[Milton Mueller]

The GNSO Council will be discussing the Whois task force recommendation
1 at the teleconference on Thursday 18 August, 2005 at 12:00 UTC.
Recommendation 1 calls for "conspicuous notice" to domain name
registrants about how their Whois data will be used.

This is an urgent notice to our Council representatives to join the
registrars and other supportive constituencies to DEFER a VOTE on
Recommendation 1, until Whois is reformed to protect privacy.

Whois Recommendation 1 was originally a good idea. However, Marc
Rotenberg of EPIC and others have alerted us to serious dangers. Under
many national laws, notification equals a waiver of one's privacy
rights. We have confirmed those dangers through filings by the ISP and
IPC constituencies.

The conclusion of the NCUC WHOIS TF members is that there is no "good
faith" in this process anymore.  NCUC, ALAC, Registrars and Registries
wanted to work on the privacy aspects of WHOIS while giving a bit of
notice to registrants about what happens to their data today.  IPC,
ISPs and BC, on the other hand, wanted to use notice to have registrants
waive all privacy rights, and then stop the privacy discussion
altogether!

We (TF members) ask our Council members to do anything in their power
to stop a vote on Rec 1 -- send it back to the TF for study of the
waiver problem, or table it until after the rest of the WHOIS discussion
under our new
terms of reference.

**Please work with all your friends on the Council -- and especially
reach out to the Registry constituency ** --- if you know them or even
if you don't.  They are the swing vote here.  Their TF members
understand our concerns.  Please lobby and work with them on
alternatives to voting on Thursday.

Otherwise, if it has to come to a vote, please vote NO loudly and
clearly.



Dr. Milton Mueller
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://www.digital-convergence.org
http://www.internetgovernance.org