.CAT WHOIS Proposed Changes - call for public comments - Think hard!!

[McTim]

On 1/21/12, Kathy Kleiman <kathy at kathykleiman.com> wrote:
> All,
> I think this is a very dangerous slippery slope. Natural persons deserve
> privacy, yes, and that completely consistent with the EU Data Protection
> Directive.  But in the US and other places around the world
> Organizations deserve privacy protection too.  If we give this up now,
> we will never get it back.


Just to provide some historical perspective, early on in the domain
name assignment history,
this "right to privacy" did not exist.  The belief then (and some like
me still harbor remnants of this belief) is that data in a PNID
(Public Network Information Database) such as WHOIS, should be
up-to-date, accurate and lead you to actual humans who can work on
network issues.


>
> I strongly agree with Avri that the organizations that protect natural
> persons are important, and so too are the organizations that deal with
> political freedoms, religious freedoms, political minorities, religious
> minorities, and even organizations who are parents organizing baseball
> teams, soccer teams and home-schooling groups.  Organizations are the
> **perfect example** of what a Noncommercial Message does **not need to
> be tied into An Physical Address in a  Globally Available Database.**
>

Agreed, but electronic addresses are MUST IMHO.


> What law enforcement really cares about is using the Whois to track down
> those who do e-commerce deals and then cheat someone. That's fair, and I
> and others are working on ways to help them with very narrowly-tailored
> policies. But that does not mean that we give up the Privacy of those
> engaged in Noncommercial Conduct or simply ordinary conduct (and in the
> US, that includes Organizations engaged in an array of protected speech
> -- note: we had a case where law enforcement wanted all the members of
> an NAACP branch, "a civil rights organization for ethnic minorities in
> the united States," and the answer was "no" on privacy grounds -
> organizations have rights of privacy and speakers of all types,
> including those banded together in organizations have privacy in their
> contentious, minority speech.)
>
> Please know: that there is an ongoing move in the gTLDs to eliminate
> proxy and privacy services,

In other words, to restore the original usefulness of WHOIS!?

 and if they prevail (now or 10 years from
> now), we will be left with only the slim protections, if any, in the
> ICANN Whois database.

Is there such a beast?  If so, I have not heard of it!

ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ whois -h whois.icann.org .com
getaddrinfo(whois.icann.org): No address associated with hostname


--
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel