Policy Changes Regarding Domain Privacy - Some Thoughts

[elf <elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would like to raise a few points regarding the proposal, if I understood it 
correctly:

1) Commercial and financial are not defined, as stated on page 16. Without core 
definitions, this is really putting the cart in front of the horse.

2) What exactly is the intended effect of this?  I am not seeing where anything 
involved with this will actually change facts on the ground in a good way, to 
wit:
    A) Those organisations that would be using the domain privacy to get away 
with sketchy things are not going to comply with ICANN policy any more than 
they comply with actual, enforceable, people-with-guns-showing-up-to-your-house 
law. 
    B) This is essentially an unfunded mandate making it prohibitively 
expensive and unpleasantly liable for any "accredited" P/P provider, which, if 
you are trying to offload responsibility onto them, good luck. The longstanding 
problem of ICANN's dispute responsibility is only going to be heightened 
through this, and... 
    C) Remember the good old bad old days where anyone could put anything into 
the registration fields and no-one could really do much of anything about it? 
And remember how much work and time it's taken to get people to put their real 
names or organisations in? Contact privacy went a LONG way towards the current 
status quo of people accepting their real information is present in some form. 
Any policy that changes that runs a very real risk of the reversal of the last 
... lets see, 14? years of work. I believe that such a thing will cause 
precisely the opposite of the intended effect, ie, a less transparent and 
accurate registry with accordingly lower trust.

To be brutally honest, making a policy for the purpose of making a policy 
doesn't seem to be a good use of ICANN's time. There are plenty of real issues, 
and clearly there are knowledge gaps regarding the psychology of users and the 
effects of previous policies. Instead of throwing more noise into the void, 
perhaps there should be an ICANN working group on the psychology and evolution 
of relationship of and with the registrars and end-users, and, once that is 
completed, a clearer, more meaningful, and voluntarily enforcable course of 
action, if any is indeed necessary, could be drawn.


-elf

PS There's also a paradox, of course... the contact privacy providers couldn't 
use their own services. That's even more liability for you to protect them.