Europeans Moderate GAC Principles, But…

Home / Blogs

Europeans Moderate GAC Principles, But…

	By Milton Mueller Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy
	December 03, 2006 Views: 14,102 Comments: 1

A U.S.-led Task Force in ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) released version 3 of its “Whois Principles” in preparation for the ICANN meeting in Brazil, where it will be debated and finalized.

European countries pushed back against U.S. Government efforts to stop ICANN from respecting privacy concerns in its handling of domain name registrant contact data, but their efforts were only partially successful. The current draft contains much that is objectionable, including a very broad definition of the purpose of Whois that is inconsistent with the one adopted by ICANN’s policy making Council, the GNSO.

You can download the draft document at the Internet Governance Project [PDF] site.

By Milton Mueller, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy

Filed Under

Comments

Suresh Ramasubramanian – Dec 13, 2006 3:02 PM

Too bad there wasnt a consensus on it eh? Not likely to be any consensus in Lisbon either .. till which time status quo (full whois data) is maintained.

Have privacy in whois if you need to - but if you cut it down, then work with the registrars to stop phishers far more than they currently do [which ranges all the way from “not much” to “a lot but still not enough”].

And tasting needs a look or two - with tasted domains being found in spam all the time. Just as an example, we’re blocking email with NS served by moniker.com right now, as it happens - there’s several spammer domains on those, besides the usual tasted and typosquatted stuff.

That narrow technical definition of whois is not going to fly, and it is going to cause far more grief for registrars with law enforcement requests, than some of them know or anticipate.

# 1 Reply | Link | Report Problems

The Weekly Wrap

More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.

I make a point of reading CircleID. There is no getting around the utility of knowing what thoughtful people are thinking and saying about our industry.

VINTON CERF
Co-designer of the TCP/IP Protocols & the Architecture of the Internet