On Aug 28, 2008, at 7:53 AM, Danny Younger wrote:
I'm part of the contingent that believes that further WHOIS studies are a total waste of time.
We don't need further studies to tell us that which is self- evident. We're not idiots. We all can see what is going on. We, in this ICANN community, are the experts on this topic and certainly don't need to pay others to investigate that which is glaringly obvious.
What we have here is nothing more than a stalling tactic.
Largely spearheaded by the United States Government. Much community time has been wasted on this subject and I agree with Danny that the current course of action will do very little to resolve the issue to anyone's satisfaction - save those interests that are comfortable with the status quo. If anything should be studied, it should focus on determining the degree to which current registrants (and no one else) is comfortable with the current whois disclosure policies. It may well be that this issue is not important to the registrant community and therefore, the status quo could be much more acceptable than we might think. However, I don't believe this is the case. I think it would be very helpful for the At-large community to take a proactive stance on this issue instead of dancing to the USG and intellectual property community drums. A proposal which balanced the information privacy requirements of individual registrants with the disclosure needs of consumer protection interests *might* have a chance of being ratified as policy. If the GNSO continues along its current track, I predict we will be stuck with the status quo for another five years, while the rest of the world implements more balanced privacy practices (i.e. the new Canadian whois policy went into effect earlier this year, and contrary to popular propaganda, the intellectual property world did *not* come to an end). As a slight aside, a question to those that advocate study of this issue - what progress has been made over the last year to achieve the better understanding of the issues since the Council determined that "more studies" was the way to go. /ross