At the risk of getting too far out of my league (I don't get to do policy work professionally), here are my CAD$0.02: On 31 January 2011 12:55, Avri Doria <avri@acm.org> wrote:
At-Large seems to care far more about the Law Enforcement point of view than it has cared about the Privacy point of view.
I guess I'd frame it differently, because I don't consider this a law enforcement issue. It's only become that way because privacy advocates want to obfuscate domain ownership (using proxies, etc) in such a way that would require intervention through law-enforcement methods (ie, court orders). If I had my way, WHOIS records would be sufficiently accurate and complete so that any end-user could locate a registrant WITHOUT the need for law-enforcement intervention. If anything, I'm trying to eliminate the legal system from the path between registrant and end-user by eliminating the levels of obfuscation that require it. I don't want the police having any more access than I would have as an individual -- that is, I want all of us to have equally accurate contact information for registrants. So .. rather than advocating "law and order" (which is generally a euphamism for pro-law-enforcement) I'd say that I'm advancing this as a position of justice -- one that allows end-users to identify the registrants that may be using their domain to spread lies, fraud, obscenities and misrepresentations -- some (but not all) of which may be illegal. I don't know of any jurisdiction in which a collective legal entity (for-profit corporation, non-profit organization, unincorporated business name) can be registered without a requirement for completeness and accuracy of its registration information. I find it frankly baffling that there are those who condone subversion of the intent of WHOIS, for I don't even consider this a freedom-of-speech issue. One can have a finely anonymous voice on the Internet without needing one's own domain name. At least I would ask for some honesty, in that obfuscation advocates should argue for the elimination of WHOIS rather than its survival with knowingly (or worse, approvingly) unstable data. I have felt an ever increasing Law and Order posture in At-Large over the
last years. Those arguing for Privacy are definitely in the minority.
You've badly mis-characterized the 'posture', which IMO defends privacy at the individual level but does not extent it as a right to disembodied registrants. This position rejects the notion that personal domain ownership is a mandatory prerequisite of free speech. And it's not a "law and order" stance for reasons described above. However, you've accurately identified the trend, which indicates that At-Large is now (finally!) starting to reflect the reality that most of the world's Internet end-users are not registrants. In this context, the end-user's desire for registrant responsibility runs counter to (and, within At-Large, trumps) the registrant's appeal to "privacy" as a dodge from said responsibility. Just my personal opinion, - Evan