urgent alert for Council members

[kathrynkl at AOL.COM]

To Norbert, Robin and all NCUC Members:
I can't tell you how strongly I support the message that Milton sent out yesterday.
While I don't want to promise that the "Notice Recommendation; Recommendation 1" is a waiver (in case we lose, we will argue that is not), recent filings from the ISPs and Intellectual Property Constituencies indicate that in their minds if 1) we create "clear and conspicuous" notice to registrants that their personal data will published in the global, real-time, WHOIS, and 2) the registrant clicks "yes", then 3) the registrant has knowingly and purposely waived all their rights in the WHOIS data.

That's crazy! But it is the reasoning we will have to face if Recommendation 1 is adopted by Council tomorrow.

So let me ask a few questions:  1)  Norbert and Robin, can you please be on the Council call on Thursday?  2) Would you have a chance to poll your Council peers and find out whether they will support tabling Recommendation 1 until *after we work on the privacy issues of WHOIS,** (including the new terms of reference -- "purpose" of WHOIS, definition of contacts, what contact data should be published).

Importantly, could you kindly contact Registry reps:  Ken Stubbs, Cary Karp and Philip Colebrook and see whether they will support tabling Recommendation 1 or voting against it?  Does anyone else in the constituency know these individuals?

Thanks so much for spending some time on this in the next few days.  The work to date has hundreds (more!) of my time and Milton's --- and now it is in your court :-).

Please let us know if you have questions or if we can help -- and feel free to cc me and Milton on emails to others.

Good luck!  Kathy

-----Original Message-----
From: Milton Mueller <Mueller at syr.edu>
To: KathrynKL at aol.com; NCUC-DISCUSS at listserv.syr.edu
Cc: nhklein at gmx.net; robin at ipjustice.org
Sent: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 10:24:49 -0400
Subject: urgent alert for Council members



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
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