Hi, On 2014-10-29 6:05 PM, Metalitz, Steven wrote:
Volker (or others), are you aware of any provider that does not reserve the right unilaterally to terminate its service, i.e., "publish" in our definition, for a range of reasons, including but not necessarily limited to violation of the terms of service?
I would imagine that most privacy providers would reserve this to protect themselves in various forms (I am not a lawyer though); just to be safe. This does not mean that they would make use of this provision lightheartedly and without verification of the request. Reserving the right to reveal information does not mean that anyone will be able to ask for it without proper legal grounds will receive the information - and not just because it might violate the domain owner's right to privacy (not just in the EU), but also because the provider wants their customers to be able to trust them. Ultimately I believe that making it easy to reveal this information will achieve nothing to protect anyone from real criminals, just like address validation doesn't. If you want to do something bad, it's easy to find an address that passes validation and yet does not match any of the domain registrant's details. They don't need whois privacy for that, but maybe in the future everybody will have to provide their ID in order to be allowed to register a domain... Giving up or limiting the right to privacy will not solve these issues. /FM