comment registry agreement

["Wolf, Egbert" <e.wolf@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear sir, madam,

The City of Amsterdam Comments on Revised Registry Agreement (April 29) WHOIS

The city of Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands and applicant for 
.Amsterdam gTLD, would like to express its very serious concern with one aspect 
of the current Agreement: the obligation to publish a WHOIS that includes 
personal data.

This obligation clearly violates our national and European laws and it is hard 
to imagine a governmental organization to signing a contract containing such an 
obligation.

This issue of course could be raised in the individual contract 'negotiations' 
but the new (and welcome) 'Conflicts with Laws' addition to article 7.13 and 
the reference therein to 'ICANN's Procedure For Handling WHOIS Conflicts with 
Privacy Law' seems to suggest that there will be no room in the contract 
negotiations for amendments on the WHOIS requirements because applicants are 
likely to be referred to the said procedure.

The City of Amsterdam is of the opinion that the usage of the 'Procedure For 
Handling WHOIS Conflicts with Privacy Law' is at this point however entirely 
inappropriate as:

a.         the Procedure may only be used if the Registry is confronted with a 
third party (public authority or civil entity) 'investigation, litigation, 
regulatory proceeding ...' which would mean that for example Amsterdam is 
forced to first sign a contract that clearly violates its national laws, 
infringe the rights of i.e. its own citizens and than has to wait until 
someone, for example our Privacy Authority, starts a legal procedure (and 
issues a fine) in order for us to contact ICANN to initiate such a Procedure.

b.         ICANN is already for years fully aware that the contractual WHOIS 
obligations are in violation with EU law and are therefore problematic for at 
least all registries based in the EU. ICANN has recognized this and has even 
agreed in two cases (.tel and .cat) to amendments to the WHOIS obligations for 
EU based gTLD registries.

The City of Amsterdam feels, as this matter is relevant to many applicants, and 
it is not difficult to predict that ICANN will have to have the same discussion 
on this subject over and over again and that the EU based registries do not 
want to be confronted with unreasoned lengthy contract negotiations, that ICANN 
should arrange for an acceptable standard deviation on this point for EU based 
registries.

Drafting and reaching agreement on such acceptable standard deviation should 
not be very difficult as we have two very clear examples that have been 
accepted by the ICANN community and we are further aware that many EU based 
applicants have mentioned these examples as being an acceptable solution in 
their cases.

The City of Amsterdam is more than willing to assist ICANN with the drafting of 
an acceptable standard WHOIS obligation deviation for EU based registries (the 
ASWOD-EU).

Kind regards,

Egbert Wolf
Design manager
Communications Department
Gemeente Amsterdam - City of Amsterdam

+31 20 552 3262
e.wolf@xxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:e.wolf@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Amstel 1, 1011PN Amsterdam
amsterdam.nl<http://amsterdam.nl>
stijlweb.amsterdam.nl<http://stijlweb.amsterdam.nl>
iamsterdam.com<http://iamsterdam.com>


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