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 woul

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?