Friends:
Over the last few weeks, you have heard about our upcoming
privacy conference called "Building Bridges on ICANN's Whois
Questions." I am writing to tell you it was a great success.
It took place on Tuesday, 11/29. At 2:30 PM as the conference
opened, the room was overflowing. Over 100 people showed up from
across the ICANN spectrum -- Registrars, Registries, Country Code
Registries, Intellectual Property, ALAC, ICANN staff... and a few ICANN
Board members even peeked in between meetings on their crowded
schedule.
We opened with Stephanie Perrin, Director of Research and Policy
for the Office of Canada's Privacy Commissioner, giving the keynote by
phone. She laid out the principles of data protection laws in Canada,
highlighted that they apply to ICANN's Whois service, and made very
clear that ICANN's rules for Whois, as they currently exist, violate
these data protection principles and laws.
She was followed by wonderful presentations from CIRA (.CA),
Nominet (.UK) and Japan Registry Services (.JP), with each speaker
showing how his/her ccTLD Whois service has changed to protect personal
data in compliance with their own national data protection laws. Their
slides made clear that the personal data about domain name registrants,
while private and protected from abuse, is still available to law
enforcement and others pursuant to due process.
Two experts then discussed how privacy operates in other areas
of Internet and telecommunications. Drew McArthur of Canada's #2
telecommunications company TELUS gave us a privacy quiz and showed that
telephone numbers and ISP data (including subscribers name/address,
email identity, etc) are all protected by privacy laws and subject to
disclosure only under "lawful access," as he called it. Chris Savage
confirmed that even in the US, with no national data protection
legislation, we have unlisted phone numbers and significant protection
of privacy for those who use ISP, telephone and even cable service.
The final panel was us -- ICANN constituency views. David Maher
of the Registry Constituency said he wished the personal data was not
even there and supports restricted access to personal data. Marcus
Heyder of the US Federal Trade Commission espoused the Intellectual
Property Constituency view that all the personal data should remain in
the Whois service and be completely accessible. Speaking for NCUC, I
argued that we don't even need to collect a lot of this personal data
for Whois. Since ICANN's mission and scope are narrow and technical
-- and we should only collect and display the technical data relevant
to this mission (and thus the existing technical data such as servers +
a technical contact).
Ross Rader closed the third panel with a very strong statement
from Registrars that ICANN's scope is very narrow and that the purpose
of the Whois service should be narrowly technical -- and specifically
involve a very clear "technical purpose" for the Whois service (a view
that strongly supports the protection of personal data). Overall, we
got great reviews: many people told me how much they liked the
Conference and many stayed all the way through.
In closing, I would like to thank Milton, Carlos, the Executive
Committee and our Council representatives for their support of this
Conference. Thank you! Also thanks to all the Conference
sponsors: NCUC, Public Interest Registry (.ORG), Registry Constituency
and Cole, Raywid & Braverman (a Washington DC law firm). Also
thanks to Milton and the Internet Governance Project for sponsoring a
wonderful Chinese dinner that brought together speakers and sponsors
(and helped further build bridges among the different sides).
Regards, Kathy (Kleiman)
p.s. press stories and slides to follow.