With regard to WHOIS, I don't see why someone can't maintain a real database with real data on the owner without making the information public for anyone to see. I don't know yet if there have been any examples of people using this data to wreak havoc, but I do know of situations where the data is mined and used for marketing purposes. While this doesn't seem like a big deal, I personally have picked up my mail to find a hundred or so 'Notices' from companies offering me some type of domain service. Thanks! Randy Glass A@L On 4/18/07, John L <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Where do users of cybercafes (those with email addresses or those without who just surf) fit in? Are each of these "individual users"
Sure. I don't see them as having interests significantly different from those of users who depend on an ISP for access and mail. Cybercafe users have little trouble setting up e-mail accounts on web mail providers, and all are at the mercy of their providers for their online identity.
in this scenario how in practice could you separate an Internet "user" from a member of the general public ...
In developed countries, you're right, they're approximately the same set of people.
Also what about those who use common Internet access points ...
Seems to me that the individuals are all the people using the access point. Same idea if they're using mobile phones, either their own phones or if they rent phones by the call from phone ladies in developing countries.
My sense is that the terminology that is being used here is highly culturally specific.
I don't intend for them to be culturally specific, and I hope we don't get bogged down in technical details in a vain attempt to map users to devices or IP addresses or e-mail addresses. Individual users are people. I am one user even though I use six different computers in a typical day, and if six people share a computer down the street or on the other side of the world, they are six users, not one.
I'm really glad that you brought up these scenarios, because these are exactly the users who are invisible in ICANN's debates. The WHOIS argument is a notable example -- many of the arguments advanced for WHOIS privacy are about people who want to register their own domains to host a web site to make political statements and want to avoid reprisals for those statements based on tracking them through their domain registration. While I believe that such people exist, they must be about 0.001% of the users in the developed world, and 0.00001% of the users in LDCs. I'd like to spend less time on technically appealing exotica and more on questions like how do you make e-mail work for legitimate individual users in west Africa when so much of the mail from that part of the world is sent by 419 criminals.
R's, John
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