Cheryl,
Have you seen our NCUC page with its Whois postings at www.ncdnhc.org? Under
"Summary of National Laws Affecting Data Privacy." This is a table I
worked on with a registrar on the Whois Task Force after we faced serious
questions whether privacy and data protection laws apply to the personal data
held in the Whois databases (which, of course, they do).
Under the link "Examine our policy statements and record of activities,"
you will find a number of our Whois statements and the accumulated work of many
years of our Constituency.
As Milton has pointed out, we have a special role, mandated in our charter,
of working on behalf of both noncommercial organizations and noncommercial
speech in the ICANN arena. It is a unique and special role.
Best,
Kathy Kleiman
<<You make many good points. I would like to continue the
discussion about what the right balance would be. One question: in your
view, who are the "anti-privacy" interests and what are their
motivations?
Cheryl B. Preston
Edwin M. Thomas
Professor of
Law
J. Reuben Clark Law School
Brigham Young University
424
JRCB
Provo, UT 84602
(801)
422-2312
[log in to unmask]
>>> Dan Krimm
<[log in to unmask]> 10/28/2007 4:16 pm >>>
At 3:09 PM -0600
10/28/07, Cheryl Preston wrote:
>BUT, I currently see no hope that the
global consensus is going to reach
>total abandonment of WHOIS without
replacing it with something that
>allows, upon service of an appropriate
court order or in compliance with
>treaty rights or otherwise, some
mechanism whereby those to whom ICANN and
>IANA (and their contractually
empowered, substructure agents) have granted
>power to access to the root
can be held responsible for seriously illegal
>activity based on
international law standards.
Certainly, and as I understand it
(and certainly in my own personal case)
NCUC's support of motion #3 is not
intended to just leave it at that, but
rather to motivate a return to
negotiations on a more equal basis, where
all parties will have an incentive
to deliberate in good faith.
The point of sunsetting the status quo
arrangements for Whois is not to
permanently abandon it, but rather to create
the negotiating environment
for a more properly balanced solution where
justified access to identifying
information is granted in specific cases to
specific agents (and abuse of
that access is punished) and personal privacy
of natural-person registrants
is protected as a default.
If
anti-privacy interests come into negotiations with everything they want,
and
the only possible outcome of negotiation is for them to lose something,
there
is utterly no incentive for them to negotiate in good faith. They
may
try to finesse their rhetoric in a way so as to indicate an
abstract
consideration of privacy concerns, but when push comes to shove and
the
final specific and detailed result is defined, they will not
budge.
Expiring the Whois status quo is not the end, it is intended as a
new
beginning. Sometimes you have to take a step back (and "over") in
order to
avoid an obstruction from taking additional steps forward. If
the status
quo cannot serve as a platform to move forward (as experience with
this
year's Whois Working Group demonstrated pretty well), then it is only
an
obstruction.
Dan