5 ms·

Protest ICANN's Proposal to Kill WHOIS Privacy

110 points by ted0 11y ago

gruez 11y ago
I'm divided on this. On one hand, if everyone can use whois privacy, what's the point of whois? On the other, I guess bad guys can always put in fake names or create their own shell companies, so we might as well let everyone have it.
- yc1010 11y ago
  Well what IS the point of whois? I always thought it was a dumb idea created by someone "just because they could" in the early days of the web, sort of how people used scrolling text and blinking fonts "just because they could" Oh speaking of Markmonitor I just send their DMCA emails to spam now (they can send me a proper notice via normal DMCA channel as is required if they so care) since every single one is for a dead pages or false notices, hell they even sent one the other day for a domain not in used in 7 years!
  - kijeda 11y ago
    WHOIS significantly predates the existence of the web. The notion is if you have a public network resource identifier (IP address, domain name, AS number, etc.) that there be a record of who to contact to report administrative or technical problems to pertaining to that network resource. It is perhaps similar to having a formally registered place of business on record for a company to receive important correspondence. Obviously the usages of WHOIS have drifted over time to go beyond that.
  - belorn 11y ago
    I think the point of whois is about the same as the point of the yellow pages. Contact information is not supposed to be secret information except when deemed necessary by circumstances. I could however see a strong argument to remove the email field, as any email address will be abused regardless of whom or what will actually read things sent to it.
Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
My concern with WHOIS is less about privacy and more about how annoying it is to update 20 domains when I move.
- Animats 11y ago
  Won't your registrar change all of them at once for you? Who are you using? Or do you have different contact information on each domain, in which case you made your own mess.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    I've registered with several registrairs since no one registrair has all TLDs.
heimatau 11y ago
I'm not sure where I read this but can't other domain registrars pull the veil on WHOIS privacy? Like Google is/has a domain registrar within the company, they have privileged access and can look behind the 'privacy'. A few years back the SEO community were up and arms about it for a week or so. I know this is worried about public knowledge but we don't really have privacy, as far as I know, due to the privileged status of domain registrars.
- duskwuff 11y ago
  No, absolutely not. This is why many registrars recommend that you disable WHOIS privacy when transferring a domain; if it's left enabled, the "private" email address displayed may not reliably forward confirmation emails to you. There are some differences from registry to registry, but the .com/.net registries don't even store contact information at the registry level -- WHOIS is the only source of contact information.
aaron-lebo 11y ago
Namecheap doesn't sell whois protection for certain domains like .io anyway, so this is less of an issue than it might seem... However, it feels like the Internet is losing its way. It is impossible to point to what specifically is causing it, but I feel like people have gotten so used to ceding their identities, data, and privacy to massive organizations like Facebook (and those organizations engage in actions like tracking anyway) that culture in general just doesn't care. The Internet used to be and still is a decentralized system which can empower people, but as it continues to get more and more centralized and governments and organizations don't see broad resistance against invasions of privacy, the Internet becomes less and less something that empowers and more like something that can trap people. And that's not even considering the Idiocracy-style apps and games that are getting pumped out on a daily basis that people are literally wasting their lives away on. I imagine this comes off as a bit snobbish or melodramatic, but the very audience that uses this site are the people creating this future. You can't get too angry at ICANN killing WHOIS privacy if you work for a company that disregards privacy, too. note: I use all of these services. I just wish there was more I dunno....rage...from the technology creators about whatever it is that we are creating, which we all seem to know isn't okay but we do anyway. It just amazes me that posts like this or documentaries about Aaron Schwartz can coexist on the frontpage with stories about the latest derivative tech company. This is very much an inudstry with two minds.
- nly 11y ago
  The problem is the class of people who care about this stuff (like you and me) have largely lost control over shaping the future of the Internet, its protocols, and the things attached to it. When it comes to the web, it feels like Google are now doing more to shape things to their business model than anyone else. HTTP/2, WebAssembly... it's only a matter of time before Chrome becomes the Play Store. This is a completely different vision to the days of centralized but federated services like e-mail, newsgroups and IRC. The web still feels like a pool of ugly hacks, but now it's ripe. When you look outside of the web, there's little innovation on the open Internet. You can probably count the exciting non-proprietary stuff that has touched mainstream in the last 15 years on one hand (BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin). Most of what's 'hot' on the Internet isn't innovative at all, and it's all walled, proprietary, and monopolised (IM, social networking, VoIP)
Animats 11y ago
ICANN is doing something quite reasonable. They're insisting that online businesses can't lie about who they are. What's the problem with that? Business operators that don't disclose their actual business name and address are criminals in many jurisdictions: California [1]. European Union.[2] The "respectyourprivacy" site raises the terrible fear that web site operators might get spam. Big deal. You have spam filters, right? Or that a business might have to have a telephone number that reaches someone. Any business which doesn't, you probably don't want to deal with anyway. I'm annoyed with the EFF for supporting this. They seem to want to make the Internet a safe space for scumbags. Look who else is supporting this - Namecheap, a bulk domain company. Who needs domains in bulk? Only scumbags, with their spam and made-for-Adsense sites. Namecheap is worried that the junk domain business might collapse. That would be a good thing. I've had my real address and phone number on all my domains for two decades. That info is also on my trademarks, patents, and D/B/A names. It's just not a problem if you're not a scumbag. [1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&group=17001-18000&file=17530-17539.6 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&gr... [2] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32000L0031:EN:HTML http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
- trentmb 11y ago
  > It's just not a problem if you're not a scumbag. If you want to avoid harassment for voicing your opinion online (see: gamergate), WHOIS privacy is quite useful. EDIT: If legal action is necessary, why wouldn't a subpoena to the registrar be sufficient? If ICANN had a policy that registrars must verify the contact information is valid, I could understand that- but this isn't what that is, is it?
- gaadd33 11y ago
  Does using a registered agent service fulfill the requirements of California law? If so then I fail to see how that's really different from whois privacy. I mean most corporations have the same address: 1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington, DE
  - Animats 11y ago
junto 11y ago
I imagine that if someone wanted to prove a point, they could just target every single person on the ICANN commitee, use their whois data and dox them. Then offer them whois privacy services. I don't agree with harassment per se, but direct action is sometimes quite effective.
jakeogh 11y ago
I doubt the pyramid domain model is going to be the dominant way we find resources in 10 years.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  It's not the dominant way today, heck most people don't even use URL's anymore they type it in Google... As for the URI model i don't think that's going to change much, unless there will be a complete abstraction which is something that companies like Google are heavily pushing for, there are some merits for it, but you will also relinquish allot of the control you have today. I don't like HTTP/2 or WebAssembly for that reason much either, having a non-ASII protocol and a browser that eats up only bytecode means i lose allot of control over the content I'm getting served. Tho the advantages of it on a technical level might be enough to shove all those concerns to the same drawer i keep my tin foil hat in.
  - jakeogh 11y ago
    Good points, although I don't mean different ways of google breaking URI's like #!. IMHO the net is much nicer to use without JS. Rather, I'm thinking about a blockchain replacing DNS. Couldn't agree more that obfuscating information behind code you must execute first is bad.
james_pm 11y ago
Another, similar petition: http://www.savedomainprivacy.org http://www.savedomainprivacy.org A very long list of domain registrars have come together on this one: 1 & 1 Internet Blacknight Domain.com DomainIt Domains By Proxy DomainCocoon Inc. Endurance International Group, Inc. eNom EuroDNS GoDaddy IDCPrivacy.com InternetX GmbH Key-Systems, GmbH Moniker Online Services, LLC Moniker Privacy Services, LLC Name.com Namecheap NetEarth One, inc. Perfect Privacy, LLC Tucows Web.com Whoisprivacy.com, Ltd.
hackuser 11y ago
Private Whois services, at least the implementations I've seen, have a big drawback: You surrender your domain registration to the company providing privacy.
pornel 11y ago
If there was competition then instead of petitioning the unelected governor we'd just take our business elsewhere. How realistic is having an alternative DNS root?
tzs 11y ago
> Under new guidelines proposed by MarkMonitor and others who represent the same industries that backed SOPA Uhm...what? When Wikimedia moved all their domains off of GoDaddy to protest GoDaddy's support of SOPA, they moved them to MarkMonitor. A quick WHOIS check shows that MarkMonitor is still the registrar wikipedia.org (I didn't check any other Wikimedia domains). Other SOPA opponents such as Google and Facebook use or have used MarkMonitor services. Fight for the Future occasionally sensationalizes things to try to get more signups, and tossing in gratuitous references to SOPA is one way to do that. I'm tempted to flag this, but it does link to the actual proposed rules so I'll refrain.
- rubbingalcohol 11y ago
  This campaign is not being run by Fight for the Future (source: I'm Fight for the Future's CTO). We've signed onto effort, but this is spearheaded by Namecheap and other groups. I respect your opinion about sensationalizing, but I disagree. There are many individuals and organizations in the industry of Internet governance who supported SOPA. More and more, the ICANN is writing rules that overwhelmingly favor copyright enforcement and eschew anonymity, such as the recent rule [allowing ICANN to cancel registrations for domains that don't verify their contact details][1] After SOPA failed, the vested interests that supported it have parted it out and have been steadily chipping away at Internet freedom bit by bit. ICANN's recent rules are one example. Trans-Pacific Partnership's [restrictions on fair use][2] and expansion of copyright law is another. Rather than pass it outright, the lobbying groups that supported SOPA are passing it little by little. The copyright and government surveillance industries have demanded an end to online privacy, and now it's up to the few remaining people who give a shit to keep the Internet from being completely taken over by malicious influencers. [1]: https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2014/01/icanns-new-rules-for-domain-registrants-require-you-to-verify-your-contact-details.html https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2014/01/icanns-new-rules-for-do... [2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150328/07314930468/how-tpp-agreement-could-be-used-to-undermine-free-speech-fair-use-us.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150328/07314930468/how-t...
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Your comment doesn't rebut the argument 'tzs made, which is that there's no evidence that MarkMonitor is a SOPA supporter. Neither of the two links you provided even contain the string "MarkMonitor". Would you mind please addressing the comment 'tzs actually wrote? It seems like an important point, worth clarifying.
gnoway 11y ago
This seems like an overreaction to me. The point of the proposal is to establish an accreditation process for privacy and proxy providers, and part of that would be to bring their practices in line with established verified-identity rules. The point is not to remove whois privacy options from everyone, and in fact the commercial/non-commercial split is specifically disregarded as a general decision point in the proposal. It looks like the only groups who are at risk of losing whois privacy protection are those engaging in online financial transactions for a commercial purpose; this is pretty clearly targeted at banks and such, not all businesses, and the proposal notes that often there are already requirements for these businesses to put this information on their website anyway. The petition site says this: "Under new guidelines proposed by MarkMonitor and others who represent the same industries that backed SOPA, domain holders with sites associated to "commercial activity" will no longer be able to protect their private information with WHOIS protection services." The linked ICANN working group document says this: "The WG agrees that the status of a registrant as a commercial organization, non-commercial organization, or individual should not be the driving factor in whether P/P services are available to the registrant. Fundamentally, P/P services should remain available to registrants irrespective of their status as commercial or non-commercial organizations or as individuals." And this: “[D]omains used for online financial transactions for commercial purpose should be ineligible for privacy and proxy registrations.” And this: "Given the foregoing discussion, the WG does not believe that P/P registrations should be limited to private individuals who use their domains for non-commercial purposes" Basically this seems like total knee-jerk crap to me and I am surprised the EFF is banging this drum. What am I missing?
- stephenr 11y ago
  I would read that as any entity doing commerce that includes a payment, online. I.e. - if you want to make credit card charges etc. Frankly I'm not fantastically bothered if that's the definition. A lot of "traditional" internet rules/guidelines seems to follow the U.S. model of being an unregulated mess.
dogma1138 11y ago
The big issue i have with this whole WHOIS privacy thing is that it does absolutely squat to prevent governments and corporations from getting the details but it makes it impossible for regular individuals to get the details when needed. I've seen multiple cases of activities raging from purely illegal activities like phishing to simple griefing, and normally you can't do shit about it. You can have phishing domains which are registered trough even basic privacy shields operating with impunity and you can't do anything about it. The police doesn't care, the privacy protection is structured in such a manner that you need to get a court order in like 3 different jurisdictions which is impossible even if you are a decent size business unless you have a lot of money not to mention a small business or an individual. If they are also running something nasty on that domain you might be lucky and you can get their hosting company to cooperate the site will go down but taking control over the domain name it self is nearly impossible. Edit: Here is an actual case from personal exprience UK Company with a mycompany.com domain with 1-1.5M GBP a year in revenue and they can't get the mycompany.co.uk domain which is used for spam and phishing taken off. The co.uk domain is used for some annoying stuff and was registered by "socialshop" and technically ENOM/Rightside but the NS servers and the actual domain registration is handled by privacyprotect.org. This whole thing was structured in such way that for anyone to talk to you you had to file criminal and civil suits in Hong Kong, Australia, UK/EU and maybe the US to deal with Rightside. This isn't something that even most SMB's could handle unless it's a huge drain on their business since this ordeal will probably cost more than a yearly revenue for most small and medium businesses. Luckily they hosted in France of all places and the hosting companies shutdown the website without asking for anythig as soon as the abuse notice was sent. It seemed like this was just a run of the mill automated phishing/spam campaign so once the website was taken down all traffic from that domain stopped, but they can revive it at any given time. The whole deal was a bit odd and sad, ENOM did the domain registration and then transferred all the control over the domain to the privacy service which was used to register the domain in the 1st place. Heck they can't even take it off since they can't touch the name servers of that domain since they don't run it. The privacy service won't speak to you and will send you on a legal wild-goose chase around the globe. This isn't even a privacy/WHOIS issue honestly, the whole registration system is designed to be abused because it's profitable that way.
IGS_SEO 11y ago
Anyone with any intelligence of the Internet/Web knows online bandits are already having a field day with government data and public information online. It is insanity for ANY company or organization to place ANY information online without PRIVACY or ENCRYPTION. Website owners need to protect what they have invested in from being stolen abused and misused worldwide. ICANN is playing big-data, police state and does not care for the protection of business or privacy. The fight for privacy is a MUST!

110 points by ted0 11y ago

gruez 11y ago

I'm divided on this. On one hand, if everyone can use whois privacy, what's the point of whois? On the other, I guess bad guys can always put in fake names or create their own shell companies, so we might as well let everyone have it.

yc1010 11y ago
Well what IS the point of whois? I always thought it was a dumb idea created by someone "just because they could" in the early days of the web, sort of how people used scrolling text and blinking fonts "just because they could" Oh speaking of Markmonitor I just send their DMCA emails to spam now (they can send me a proper notice via normal DMCA channel as is required if they so care) since every single one is for a dead pages or false notices, hell they even sent one the other day for a domain not in used in 7 years!
- kijeda 11y ago
  WHOIS significantly predates the existence of the web. The notion is if you have a public network resource identifier (IP address, domain name, AS number, etc.) that there be a record of who to contact to report administrative or technical problems to pertaining to that network resource. It is perhaps similar to having a formally registered place of business on record for a company to receive important correspondence. Obviously the usages of WHOIS have drifted over time to go beyond that.
- belorn 11y ago
  I think the point of whois is about the same as the point of the yellow pages. Contact information is not supposed to be secret information except when deemed necessary by circumstances. I could however see a strong argument to remove the email field, as any email address will be abused regardless of whom or what will actually read things sent to it.

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

My concern with WHOIS is less about privacy and more about how annoying it is to update 20 domains when I move.

Animats 11y ago
Won't your registrar change all of them at once for you? Who are you using? Or do you have different contact information on each domain, in which case you made your own mess.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  I've registered with several registrairs since no one registrair has all TLDs.

heimatau 11y ago

I'm not sure where I read this but can't other domain registrars pull the veil on WHOIS privacy? Like Google is/has a domain registrar within the company, they have privileged access and can look behind the 'privacy'. A few years back the SEO community were up and arms about it for a week or so. I know this is worried about public knowledge but we don't really have privacy, as far as I know, due to the privileged status of domain registrars.

duskwuff 11y ago
No, absolutely not. This is why many registrars recommend that you disable WHOIS privacy when transferring a domain; if it's left enabled, the "private" email address displayed may not reliably forward confirmation emails to you. There are some differences from registry to registry, but the .com/.net registries don't even store contact information at the registry level -- WHOIS is the only source of contact information.

aaron-lebo 11y ago

Namecheap doesn't sell whois protection for certain domains like .io anyway, so this is less of an issue than it might seem... However, it feels like the Internet is losing its way. It is impossible to point to what specifically is causing it, but I feel like people have gotten so used to ceding their identities, data, and privacy to massive organizations like Facebook (and those organizations engage in actions like tracking anyway) that culture in general just doesn't care. The Internet used to be and still is a decentralized system which can empower people, but as it continues to get more and more centralized and governments and organizations don't see broad resistance against invasions of privacy, the Internet becomes less and less something that empowers and more like something that can trap people. And that's not even considering the Idiocracy-style apps and games that are getting pumped out on a daily basis that people are literally wasting their lives away on. I imagine this comes off as a bit snobbish or melodramatic, but the very audience that uses this site are the people creating this future. You can't get too angry at ICANN killing WHOIS privacy if you work for a company that disregards privacy, too. note: I use all of these services. I just wish there was more I dunno....rage...from the technology creators about whatever it is that we are creating, which we all seem to know isn't okay but we do anyway. It just amazes me that posts like this or documentaries about Aaron Schwartz can coexist on the frontpage with stories about the latest derivative tech company. This is very much an inudstry with two minds.

nly 11y ago
The problem is the class of people who care about this stuff (like you and me) have largely lost control over shaping the future of the Internet, its protocols, and the things attached to it. When it comes to the web, it feels like Google are now doing more to shape things to their business model than anyone else. HTTP/2, WebAssembly... it's only a matter of time before Chrome becomes the Play Store. This is a completely different vision to the days of centralized but federated services like e-mail, newsgroups and IRC. The web still feels like a pool of ugly hacks, but now it's ripe. When you look outside of the web, there's little innovation on the open Internet. You can probably count the exciting non-proprietary stuff that has touched mainstream in the last 15 years on one hand (BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin). Most of what's 'hot' on the Internet isn't innovative at all, and it's all walled, proprietary, and monopolised (IM, social networking, VoIP)

Animats 11y ago

ICANN is doing something quite reasonable. They're insisting that online businesses can't lie about who they are. What's the problem with that? Business operators that don't disclose their actual business name and address are criminals in many jurisdictions: California [1]. European Union.[2] The "respectyourprivacy" site raises the terrible fear that web site operators might get spam. Big deal. You have spam filters, right? Or that a business might have to have a telephone number that reaches someone. Any business which doesn't, you probably don't want to deal with anyway. I'm annoyed with the EFF for supporting this. They seem to want to make the Internet a safe space for scumbags. Look who else is supporting this - Namecheap, a bulk domain company. Who needs domains in bulk? Only scumbags, with their spam and made-for-Adsense sites. Namecheap is worried that the junk domain business might collapse. That would be a good thing. I've had my real address and phone number on all my domains for two decades. That info is also on my trademarks, patents, and D/B/A names. It's just not a problem if you're not a scumbag. [1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&group=17001-18000&file=17530-17539.6 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&gr... [2] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32000L0031:EN:HTML http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...

trentmb 11y ago
> It's just not a problem if you're not a scumbag. If you want to avoid harassment for voicing your opinion online (see: gamergate), WHOIS privacy is quite useful. EDIT: If legal action is necessary, why wouldn't a subpoena to the registrar be sufficient? If ICANN had a policy that registrars must verify the contact information is valid, I could understand that- but this isn't what that is, is it?
gaadd33 11y ago
Does using a registered agent service fulfill the requirements of California law? If so then I fail to see how that's really different from whois privacy. I mean most corporations have the same address: 1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington, DE
- Animats 11y ago

junto 11y ago

I imagine that if someone wanted to prove a point, they could just target every single person on the ICANN commitee, use their whois data and dox them. Then offer them whois privacy services. I don't agree with harassment per se, but direct action is sometimes quite effective.

jakeogh 11y ago

I doubt the pyramid domain model is going to be the dominant way we find resources in 10 years.

dogma1138 11y ago
It's not the dominant way today, heck most people don't even use URL's anymore they type it in Google... As for the URI model i don't think that's going to change much, unless there will be a complete abstraction which is something that companies like Google are heavily pushing for, there are some merits for it, but you will also relinquish allot of the control you have today. I don't like HTTP/2 or WebAssembly for that reason much either, having a non-ASII protocol and a browser that eats up only bytecode means i lose allot of control over the content I'm getting served. Tho the advantages of it on a technical level might be enough to shove all those concerns to the same drawer i keep my tin foil hat in.
- jakeogh 11y ago
  Good points, although I don't mean different ways of google breaking URI's like #!. IMHO the net is much nicer to use without JS. Rather, I'm thinking about a blockchain replacing DNS. Couldn't agree more that obfuscating information behind code you must execute first is bad.

james_pm 11y ago

Another, similar petition: http://www.savedomainprivacy.org http://www.savedomainprivacy.org A very long list of domain registrars have come together on this one: 1 & 1 Internet Blacknight Domain.com DomainIt Domains By Proxy DomainCocoon Inc. Endurance International Group, Inc. eNom EuroDNS GoDaddy IDCPrivacy.com InternetX GmbH Key-Systems, GmbH Moniker Online Services, LLC Moniker Privacy Services, LLC Name.com Namecheap NetEarth One, inc. Perfect Privacy, LLC Tucows Web.com Whoisprivacy.com, Ltd.

hackuser 11y ago

Private Whois services, at least the implementations I've seen, have a big drawback: You surrender your domain registration to the company providing privacy.

pornel 11y ago

If there was competition then instead of petitioning the unelected governor we'd just take our business elsewhere. How realistic is having an alternative DNS root?

tzs 11y ago

> Under new guidelines proposed by MarkMonitor and others who represent the same industries that backed SOPA Uhm...what? When Wikimedia moved all their domains off of GoDaddy to protest GoDaddy's support of SOPA, they moved them to MarkMonitor. A quick WHOIS check shows that MarkMonitor is still the registrar wikipedia.org (I didn't check any other Wikimedia domains). Other SOPA opponents such as Google and Facebook use or have used MarkMonitor services. Fight for the Future occasionally sensationalizes things to try to get more signups, and tossing in gratuitous references to SOPA is one way to do that. I'm tempted to flag this, but it does link to the actual proposed rules so I'll refrain.

rubbingalcohol 11y ago
This campaign is not being run by Fight for the Future (source: I'm Fight for the Future's CTO). We've signed onto effort, but this is spearheaded by Namecheap and other groups. I respect your opinion about sensationalizing, but I disagree. There are many individuals and organizations in the industry of Internet governance who supported SOPA. More and more, the ICANN is writing rules that overwhelmingly favor copyright enforcement and eschew anonymity, such as the recent rule [allowing ICANN to cancel registrations for domains that don't verify their contact details][1] After SOPA failed, the vested interests that supported it have parted it out and have been steadily chipping away at Internet freedom bit by bit. ICANN's recent rules are one example. Trans-Pacific Partnership's [restrictions on fair use][2] and expansion of copyright law is another. Rather than pass it outright, the lobbying groups that supported SOPA are passing it little by little. The copyright and government surveillance industries have demanded an end to online privacy, and now it's up to the few remaining people who give a shit to keep the Internet from being completely taken over by malicious influencers. [1]: https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2014/01/icanns-new-rules-for-domain-registrants-require-you-to-verify-your-contact-details.html https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2014/01/icanns-new-rules-for-do... [2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150328/07314930468/how-tpp-agreement-could-be-used-to-undermine-free-speech-fair-use-us.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150328/07314930468/how-t...
- tptacek 11y ago
  Your comment doesn't rebut the argument 'tzs made, which is that there's no evidence that MarkMonitor is a SOPA supporter. Neither of the two links you provided even contain the string "MarkMonitor". Would you mind please addressing the comment 'tzs actually wrote? It seems like an important point, worth clarifying.

gnoway 11y ago

This seems like an overreaction to me. The point of the proposal is to establish an accreditation process for privacy and proxy providers, and part of that would be to bring their practices in line with established verified-identity rules. The point is not to remove whois privacy options from everyone, and in fact the commercial/non-commercial split is specifically disregarded as a general decision point in the proposal. It looks like the only groups who are at risk of losing whois privacy protection are those engaging in online financial transactions for a commercial purpose; this is pretty clearly targeted at banks and such, not all businesses, and the proposal notes that often there are already requirements for these businesses to put this information on their website anyway. The petition site says this: "Under new guidelines proposed by MarkMonitor and others who represent the same industries that backed SOPA, domain holders with sites associated to "commercial activity" will no longer be able to protect their private information with WHOIS protection services." The linked ICANN working group document says this: "The WG agrees that the status of a registrant as a commercial organization, non-commercial organization, or individual should not be the driving factor in whether P/P services are available to the registrant. Fundamentally, P/P services should remain available to registrants irrespective of their status as commercial or non-commercial organizations or as individuals." And this: “[D]omains used for online financial transactions for commercial purpose should be ineligible for privacy and proxy registrations.” And this: "Given the foregoing discussion, the WG does not believe that P/P registrations should be limited to private individuals who use their domains for non-commercial purposes" Basically this seems like total knee-jerk crap to me and I am surprised the EFF is banging this drum. What am I missing?

stephenr 11y ago
I would read that as any entity doing commerce that includes a payment, online. I.e. - if you want to make credit card charges etc. Frankly I'm not fantastically bothered if that's the definition. A lot of "traditional" internet rules/guidelines seems to follow the U.S. model of being an unregulated mess.

dogma1138 11y ago

The big issue i have with this whole WHOIS privacy thing is that it does absolutely squat to prevent governments and corporations from getting the details but it makes it impossible for regular individuals to get the details when needed. I've seen multiple cases of activities raging from purely illegal activities like phishing to simple griefing, and normally you can't do shit about it. You can have phishing domains which are registered trough even basic privacy shields operating with impunity and you can't do anything about it. The police doesn't care, the privacy protection is structured in such a manner that you need to get a court order in like 3 different jurisdictions which is impossible even if you are a decent size business unless you have a lot of money not to mention a small business or an individual. If they are also running something nasty on that domain you might be lucky and you can get their hosting company to cooperate the site will go down but taking control over the domain name it self is nearly impossible. Edit: Here is an actual case from personal exprience UK Company with a mycompany.com domain with 1-1.5M GBP a year in revenue and they can't get the mycompany.co.uk domain which is used for spam and phishing taken off. The co.uk domain is used for some annoying stuff and was registered by "socialshop" and technically ENOM/Rightside but the NS servers and the actual domain registration is handled by privacyprotect.org. This whole thing was structured in such way that for anyone to talk to you you had to file criminal and civil suits in Hong Kong, Australia, UK/EU and maybe the US to deal with Rightside. This isn't something that even most SMB's could handle unless it's a huge drain on their business since this ordeal will probably cost more than a yearly revenue for most small and medium businesses. Luckily they hosted in France of all places and the hosting companies shutdown the website without asking for anythig as soon as the abuse notice was sent. It seemed like this was just a run of the mill automated phishing/spam campaign so once the website was taken down all traffic from that domain stopped, but they can revive it at any given time. The whole deal was a bit odd and sad, ENOM did the domain registration and then transferred all the control over the domain to the privacy service which was used to register the domain in the 1st place. Heck they can't even take it off since they can't touch the name servers of that domain since they don't run it. The privacy service won't speak to you and will send you on a legal wild-goose chase around the globe. This isn't even a privacy/WHOIS issue honestly, the whole registration system is designed to be abused because it's profitable that way.

IGS_SEO 11y ago

Anyone with any intelligence of the Internet/Web knows online bandits are already having a field day with government data and public information online. It is insanity for ANY company or organization to place ANY information online without PRIVACY or ENCRYPTION. Website owners need to protect what they have invested in from being stolen abused and misused worldwide. ICANN is playing big-data, police state and does not care for the protection of business or privacy. The fight for privacy is a MUST!