There certainly should be a balance. But when there are a billion Internet users, and thousands of individual vanity domain registrants
Whois is more than "second level domain" information. It's also IP address information.
ICANN has nothing to do with IP address WHOIS, which is managed by the RIRs. Surely anyone who's involved in the WHOIS review is familar with that basic fact.
What's the problem with thin whois ... delegating the whois down to the registrar or reseller, down to the access ISP? This way the collection, deletion and publishing laws can be respected directly.
Ah. You must never actually tried to get useful information out of the .COM and .NET WHOIS. It's a disaster for many reasons, as is apparent to anyone who tries to use it. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly