[governance] Rights of the other 99.9% - privacy, ICANN, whois

[John Levine]

>> Put crudely, money and power led to IP rights trumping privacy
>> rights.

I doubt I'll change anyone's mind here, but I do think it's worth
pointing out that the WHOIS issue is far more complex than the evil
trademark lawyers vs. innocent users that it is often portrayed in
forums like these.  Personally, I see it more as vanity domain
registrants vs. the other 99.9% of Internet users.

It's true, people can find you if your information is in WHOIS.  On
the other hand, the assumption that registering a domain places no
obligations on the registrant beyond paying the ten bucks is absurd.
The vast majority of domains are registered for commercial purposes,
some for legitimate commercial purposes, a lot for illegitimate
commercial purposes.  Bad guys use domains for all sorts of egregious
privacy violations, from so-called co-reg where they get you to
provide your e-mail address and other personal information and then
sell it to a thousand sleazy businesses, to phishing, to outright
fraud, to 419 scams.  WHOIS info, even in its current rather imperfect
form, is extremely useful when locating, shutting down, and occasionally
even prosecuting these bad guys.

So although I do not for a minute disagree that natural persons who
register domains have privacy rights, people who don't have their own
domains have privacy rights too, and there are a lot more people
without domains than with.

If the WHOIS privacy crowd admitted that they were trying to carve
out an exception for the sliver of domains registered by individuals,
they might make some progress.  As it is, there's an alliance of
convenience between the trademark lawyers (who are indeed evil) and
various formal and informal law enforcement (who are trying to deal
with evil) that has valid arguments in favor of public WHOIS and
aren't going away.

R's,
John




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