Roberto Gaetano wrote: To begin - it is really good to see your name on an email again. I trust you are doing well.
I disagree. Though many countries have privacy protections not provided by the USA, I suspect that those countries will allow disclosure when a party agrees to that disclosure, by contract.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but the issue is what happens when the party does *not* agree. In some countries you cannot force them to agree, therefore the problem about different competitive advantage for registrars.
This is far from an easy point. There is in US contract law the idea of a "contract of adhesion" - the most typical example is when you drive into a parking lot and a machine ejects a bit of cardboard on which are printed purported terms and conditions. Are you bound by those or not? Suffice it to say that the answer to that question probably varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction around the world. And since the Whois issue spans the world, I'm sure that local answers will vary. One aspect that may influence those answers is the fact that there is really no practical alternative to ICANN's whois regime. (Well, there are the ccTLDs and that perhaps weakens the entire thought that follows.) One may argue that because of ICANN's all-enveloping coverage and also the fact that ICANN's UDRP and whois policies were made without much (or any) power of the public at large to affect those policies, that the privacy-breaking aspects of whois should be interpreted in a narrow or weak (i.e. protective of privacy) way. I have long suggested that any one who makes an inquiry into the whois data should be obligated to leave an electric "calling card" record that informs the data subject of the name, identity, affiliation, contact information, and asserted reason for making the inquiry. It seems only fair that if Mr. X is asking about you that you should be able to know who Mr. X is and why he's looking you up. --karl--