GNSO representation & WHOIS

[Milton L Mueller]

thanks for asking, Bill. 
I think most of us were pretty much agreed that Whois studies were a delaying tactic the U.S. successfully used to prevent the GNSO from taking any action on privacy, and to give the IPR interests a new stick with which to beat the privacy-proxy services of the registrars. Typically ncuc and the registrars are against these studies altogether. for a while, the registries were, too. however, verisign (either as a corp or perhaps due to the personality of Chuck Gomes) is less privacy-friendly and more law enforcement/trademark friendly than the other registries, and seems to have turned them around. furthermore, GNSO politics have turned the idea of proposals into a fairly complicated thing (ask Avri why). This caused the GAC to ridicule the gNSO in Cairo and may even cause it to bypass it altogether and go directly to the Board to ask for studies. my advice is, push with the registrars for no studies; failing that, pick one or two that actually contribute something new to the debate, such as: how many gTLD registrants are actually  natural persons?
 
I had a very intense conversation/debate with William Dee of the EU about this in Cairo. I asked him how empirical studies about, say, whether 24% or 34% of the registrants in .com are natural persons in any way affects the principle that natural persons must have their private info shielded according to EU law. He couldn't answer that, of course.
 

Milton Mueller
Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
------------------------------
Internet Governance Project:
http://internetgovernance.org <http://internetgovernance.org/> 


 


________________________________

	From: Non-Commercial User Constituency [mailto:NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of William Drake
	Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2008 9:40 AM
	To: NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
	Subject: [NCUC-DISCUSS] GNSO representation & WHOIS
	
	
	Hello,

	A priori one would think that besides offering our own perspectives, one of the functions of the three GNSO reps ought to be to solicit views from NCUC members and convey the sense of the group within relevant GNSO discussions. I don't know what the practice and understanding was here previously, and would be interested to hear from people as to what model to follow.

	Since Mary and I were added during Cairo, there's been a rather dauntingly high volume of traffic on the GNSO council list, a good deal of which pertains to possible decisions on immediate action items (see for example http://gnso.icann.org/meetings/pending-action-list.pdf).  One issue of presumably strong local interest concerns WHOIS and the recommendations advanced by the registries constituency, see below.  Would people have some thoughts on this that Mary, Carlos and I should be conveying?

	Should we as a matter of course pass along all similar requests for constituency views and such?

	Thanks,

	Bill



		From: Glen de Saint Géry <Glen at icann.org>
		Date: November 23, 2008 2:36:57 PM GMT+01:00
		To: "ntfy-gnso-council at icann.org" <ntfy-gnso-council at icann.org>
		Subject: Reminder:WHOIS discussion/next steps



		Dear Councillors,

		Reminder, please respond if you have not already done so.


		The Council agreed on Thursday 20 to schedule a WHOIS meeting.
		Constituencies are requested to work on prioritization and view points on the proposed working model:
		 http://gnso.icann.org/drafts/gnso-whois-study-recommendations-ryc-29oct08.pdf
		in preparation for the meeting.


	
	***********************************************************
	William J. Drake  
	Senior Associate
	Centre for International Governance
	Graduate Institute of International and
	  Development Studies
	Geneva, Switzerland
	william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch
	***********************************************************


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/attachments/20081123/2e6a3ab2/attachment.html>