John L ha scritto:
Really, I am as enthusiastic about personal privacy as anyone, but it's largely irrelevant to WHOIS because in most domains, the vast majority of registrations are by businesses and organizations, not by individuals. It would make far more sense to have an exception process along the lines of the current proxy WHOIS for the small minority of individual registrants than to do wholesale hiding of information about businesses.
Of course - the EU privacy law only applies to natural persons. It does not apply to legal persons.
It is of course true that registries and registrars have to comply with their national laws, but it is my impression that advocates of anonymous registrations are misrepresenting what's actually in WHOIS.
The EU law is not about anonymous registrations, nor OPOC or any other proposal currently under consideration would allow anonymous registrations (well, not more anonymous than they already can be). It would just restrict access to personal information to public authorities, which are accountable to the general public. If these authorities want to forward this information to private parties that help them, under their own responsibility, they can of course do so. The only thing that would be prevented is unaccountable and untraceable access to this information. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------