Regarding exposing WHOIS data

[Donavan Kienenberger <dlk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear ICANN,

I am against moving to exposing WHOIS data for commercial or anyone for that 
matter. I've owned a domain since the 1990's before Privacy & Proxy Services 
came into being. The amount of spam I received because my whois data was public 
was overwhelming.  I would get over 300 emails a day, all junk mail. I missed 
many email sent out by ICANN because they were buried in the flood of spam. as 
I only used that email account for registrar services,  all that spam came from 
groups harvesting my public whois data. Once I discovered Privacy & Proxy 
Services I was able to receive useful notifications again. They were able to 
give me a randomizing whois email address that kept spammers email lists foiled 
 and allowed me to have contact with my domain provider and not miss important 
announcements and notifications specific to the purpose of the contact 
information I was providing.  If you want to make it harder for users to 
received notices from you, opening the whois to the public will do that. I 
speak from experience.  In addition, the address on my whois database is my 
home address! I don't want that to become available!  That makes me feel 
extremely unsafe! Not every commercial entity is a big organization. A lot of 
businesses are run out of ones home, so I would not be the only one not feeling 
secure anymore! 

- Donavan