Weekly posting summary for alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org
Total of 3 messages in the last 7 days. script run at: Fri Jun 25 00:53:04 EDT 2010 Messages | Bytes | Who --------+------+--------+----------+------------------------ 33.33% | 1 | 33.86% | 5322 | narten at us.ibm.com 33.33% | 1 | 33.51% | 5267 | heidi.ullrich at icann.org 33.33% | 1 | 32.63% | 5129 | joly at punkcast.com --------+------+--------+----------+------------------------ 100.00% | 3 |100.00% | 15718 | Total
Hi All, I was asked by some Internet users in Iran to seek advice from ALAC on whether they consider the following an at large issue, and if so, what kind of help ALAC could render. There may also be an effort to launch formal complaints with ICANN. Any advice from at large community and civil society would be most welcome. Here' the case: For about the last two months GoDaddy has been blocking queries to its public WHOIS from IPs identified with Iran. Note that this is beyond blocking potential Iranian registrants from registering a domain with GoDaddy, something that company can argue conflicts with US economic boycott of Iran. WHOIS is a universal public service with uses other than registering a domain with the WHOIS provider. Among other things, public WHOIS is a standard tool in dispute resolutions. GoDaddy may also be in breach of its contract with ICANN re the universal availability of its WHOIS data. There are, I understand, documented cases of individual end users having been harmed by this act of GoDaddy and the potential for other cases is obvious. For these reasons I consider this issue to be one that merits the attention of at large community and ALAC. Thank you, Siavash (former ALAC member from Asia/Pacific)
On 06/25/2010 02:39 AM, Siavash Shahshahani wrote:
... Here' the case: For about the last two months GoDaddy has been blocking queries to its public WHOIS from IPs identified with Iran.
Here in the US it is generally accepted that obligations that arise from a Federal (national) or State (regional) law supersede duties that arise from a private contract. The US does have significant statutory and regulatory restraints on interactions with Iran. Those restraints trump any contractual term to the contrary. As a consequence it is my sense that ICANN's has at best a very weak contractual lever to affect Godaddy's position. And that lever is further weakened - perhaps to the vanishing point - by the presently increasing tensions between Iran and other nations. Moreover, there is a major weakness in an argument that claims that whois is something non-commercial and thus ought to be exempted from restrictions placed by the US onto US citizens and companies. That weakness comes from the fact that whois has become a part of commerce in that it is used very largely, and indeed largely exists, because of demands from industrial actors such as the trademark protection industry. And whois is a heavy commercial element of "domainer" commerce that registrars are often bought and sold simply to acquire their bandwidth allocation for the prodigious amount of whois polling that goes on among registrars to check for name availability. There is no particular technical enhancement to internet stability that arises from ICANN's transformation of whois into an engine of trademark and domain name commerce. If the ALAC were to step into this my sense is that it would be as futile as an attempt to carve El Capitan with a marshmallow. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan ) A more fruitful path might be to demand that ICANN alter its whois rules so that "whois" would no longer be a tool that is used to support commercial activity. --karl--
participants (3)
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Karl Auerbach -
Siavash Shahshahani -
Thomas Narten