RE: [alac] ALERT: What is WHOIS really fpr

["Roberto Gaetano" <alac_liaison@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I fully agree with Bret, the solution is not a plain YES or NO, is rather on 
how we put a reasonable system in place that takes into account all 
stakeholders.

Quite a while ago, I believe it was in Tunis, but I might be wrong, I made 
the example of car licence plates. The file is accessible for law 
enforcement and any other legal reasons, but data is not publicly available.

Another item I raised in the same meeting was who is benefitting and who is 
paying. Intellectual Property lawyers would like to use the Whois to check 
IP violations, but the registrars or registry, depending on the model, has 
to offer this service for free. It is like if a large multinational 
corporation would force all national car licence plates registries to offer 
free access to the corporation to search whether any of the local affiliates 
own cars.

Regards,
Roberto GAETANO
ALAC
ICANN BoD Liaison





> From: "Bret Fausett" <bfausett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "'John M Levine'" <johnl@xxxxxxxx>,        "'Annette Muehlberg'" 
> <annette.muehlberg@xxxxxx>
> CC: "'ALAC'" <alac@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: RE: [alac] ALERT: What is WHOIS really fpr
> Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:59:10 -0700
>
> > I can tell you from personal experience that WHOIS
> > info, even in its current rather imperfect form, is very
> > useful when tracking them down.
>
> You're right that whois has some practical uses in law enforcement, etc. At
> the same time, the required public disclosure of identity information also
> has some privacy implications. At the end of the day, we're still going to
> have to make a judgment call about whether the benefits of public whois 
> data
> outweigh the privacy consequences.
>
> The proposal I like is the "tiered access" model. The concept is that
> personal data is unavailable to the general public via simple whois queries
> but available to law enforcement, ISPs, lawyers, etc. who sign up for
> special access. Another idea I like is a system that would allow the
> registrant to review his/her own whois data to see who has accessed the
> 'second-tiered' information. This seems like a decent compromise, or at
> least as close to a middle ground as we're likely to see.
>
>       Bret

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