Hi All, I know some people are en route, and others leave soon. Safe travels! For a little more light reading, I want to draw your attention to four documents shared by Bill Smith after the last meeting. These are four submissions of the Article 29 Working Party, one is an official opinion, and the other are three letters from then-Article 29 WP Chair Peter Schaar, Germany's powerful data protection commissioner, to ICANN's then-chair Vint Cerf. Bill is truly a researcher extraordinaire to find these documents! (Quick Note: the Article 29 Working Party is created by the EU Privacy Directive for all EU national data protection commissioners.) Below are a few snippets of the documents' very interesting discussions.... and full docs attached for the rest! Enjoy, Kathy _Four documents, 2003-2007_ 1) "Opinion 2/2003 on the application of the data protection principles to the Whois directories" - "The Working Party encourages ICANN and the Whois community to look at privacy enhancing ways to run the Whois directories in a way that serves its original purpose whilst protecting the rights of individuals. It should in any case be possible for individuals to register domain names without their personal details appearing on a publicly available register." 2) Schaar to Cerf, 6/22/06 - "The Article 29 WP is witnessing the growing importance of the WHOIS discussions as more and more individuals are registering their own domain names and in this connection there have been complaints about improper use of the WHOIS data in several countries." 3) Schaar to Cerf, 3/12/07 - Referencing the Operational Point of Contact (OPOC) proposal - "The Article 29 WP welcomes that the GNSO Whois Task Force has adopted a definition for the purpose of WHOIS as a basis for its work. As pointed out in previous submissions, such a purpose definition is a central element in determining whether a specific processing or use of personal data is in accordance with EU data protection legislation. The definition given in the report reads: "The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information sufficient to contact a responsible party for a particular gTLD domain name who can resolve, or reliably pass on data to a party who can resolve, issues related to the configuration of the records associated with the domain name within a DNS nameserver." "The Article 29 WP acknowledges the legitimacy of the purpose of the making available of some personal data through the WHOIS services, when this publication is necessary for the technical functioning of the Internet network as set out in the purpose definition. This publicity is necessary in order to put the person running a Website in a position to face the legal and technical responsibilities which are inherent to the running of such a site. However, in its current form the database does not take account of the data protection and privacy rights of those identifiable persons who are named as the contacts for domain names and organizations." --