The 2nd amendment was all about the colonists protesting ...
Colonists? The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, a decade after the revolution was over. The 2nd is about southern militias that put down slave rebellions. Read about it here: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-pr... We can certainly agree it has no relevance to anything ICANN does.
What is being developed by the IETF is the WEIRDS protocol which, amongst other things, will allow differentiated access to Whois data. This will allow those who want to exercise their legitimate right to privacy to do so, ...
Sorry, no, that's not what WEIRDS is doing. For one thing, WEIRDS is really about redoing WHOIS for IP addresses. As the group was being chartered, a bunch of people showed up, loudly demanded that we do names as well, and then predictably disappeared without doing any work. (Not quite all, one or two guys are toiling away, but given how poorly the names community understands the issues, I doubt there will be much progress.) So WEIRDS is unlikely to produce anything for names. We knew this would happen, so the charter specifically allows the IP address work to go ahead while the names spin their wheels. Even if it does, the differentiated access is nothing new. Try looking up six names in a row at Godaddy's WHOIS server, and you'll find that it starts providing much less info in each response, unless you're connecting from an IP for which they've relaxed the rate limits. The WEIRDS stuff just provides a cleaner way to do what existing WHOIS servers do with per-IP rate limits and CAPTCHAs. And please keep in mind that the IETF has exactly zero interest in getting involved in policy disputes, so we'll design a way that a client can pass credentials to a WEIRDS server, but not what the server does with those credentials. This project is to provide a spec that the RIRs and perhaps name registries can use to do what they do now, but in a way that scales better and is easier to script. R's, John