CircleID

How can anyone stand ICANN anymore? The organization is unbearable. And they act like they want to be the United Nations, as if that's a good thing.

Wendy is right that intellectual property interests have thrown the biggest monkey wrench in the effort to put some privacy where privacy is warranted in domain name registration. IP holders are probably the most successful consitituency in dealing with ICANN. I have a lot of sympathy for them usually, but this is a good example of how it can go too far.

When arguing for privacy we usually hear the example of the web site for a battered women's shelter or some other entity obviously deserving of privacy, but anyone can be a victim of privacy violations through whois. We all know that many a spammer's address database has been harvested trhough the whois database, and some even send spam snail mail to harvested postal addresses.

OPOC - the so-called "operational" model - has enough operational issues in it to make it very non operational indeed. And the people who are making common cause here are doing so for entirely different reasons -

IP lawyers and law enforcement on one side (brand protection, rather more serious law enforcement tracing scams and frauds), a huge group of "civil society" that can't trust each other or work together, registrars who point out that it will eat into their margins when they've already driven down prices to the point of being loss leaders ..

In other words, there's no consensus. And attempts to achieve any are doomed to failure because the basic motivations here predate the Internet or even the ARPANET, let alone icann, domain names or whois.  And because most of the actors in this have been at loggerheads often enough not to trust any other actor in this mess an inch farther than they can throw them.

As for INTA's template driven signature campaign, astroturf is nothing new and has been tried across the political spectrum. Why, Milton Mueller was doing just the same thing on circleid, with his "Send A Message To the NTIA" not too long back.  What's sauce for the goose, etc etc.

No, I confidently expect status quo (aka full whois) to be the norm for the next decade or three.