I'm the author of this piece. I considered writing a full policy breakdown but figured people would get bored very quickly. Plus, things keep moving so fast (a

I'm the author of this piece. I considered writing a full policy breakdown but figured people would get bored very quickly. Plus, things keep moving so fast (almost arbitrarily sometimes) that I wonder whether it's worthwhile. Fundamentally, the issue is this: US intellectual property lawyers are very well organized and have the backing of big corporations. As a result, they have a disproportionate influence in US organizations - in this case, ICANN. With each new proposal, each new rule, each new policy, these (very smart) IP lawyers find ways around it to suit their main goals. And because ICANN, unfortunately, has no moral or ethical center, it tends to bend its own policies to accommodate whoever is the most powerful and/or loudest on any given issue. In this case, the American IP lawyers are very driven to retain the existing system. But in this particular case of Whois they have come up against a brick wall of decided European law. And they have been trying to find ways around it, pressuring ICANN into a series of policy positions that are very clever but can't go anywhere because the law is settled. Plus the data regulators are the people in charge of deciding how it is interpreted. And they, naturally, have a fairly strict interpretation of GDRP. It's worth noting btw that European governments have often ignored the data regulators in favor of their own corporations (just take a look at the whole Privacy Shield debate). But in the case of GDPR, the data regulators are in the driving seat. At least for now. So I could give a detailed rundown of what ICANN has proposed, and how it has changed, and how it is going to change again. But in truth it doesn't matter - ICANN and the IP lawyers will try on any new interpretation they can think of to get what they want - access to the contact details of every domain name - and they will discard any or all of them as soon as they no longer further that goal. What's really happening is that ICANN has, for the first time, hit a situation where it doesn't get to decide for itself what happens. As such this Whois/GDPR process is shining a spotlight on the dangerously flawed policy-making process of this critical organization where it keeps insisting on transparently bad policies, keeps putting forward arguments that don't make sense, and keeps trying to bend its own processes to fit with a pre-determined conclusion. And the Europeans look at it, say No, and the whole facade comes crumbling down. And that is causing massive temporal dissonance at the organization in charge of the internet's naming and numbering systems. That's what this article is about. And it's unlikely to be the last.