ICANN - Respect Our Privacy

[Jack Tench <jack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear ICANN,

Regarding the proposed rules governing companies that provide WHOIS privacy
services (as set forth in the Privacy and Policy Services Accreditation
Issues Policy document):

If any party requires the private information and contact details of the
individual or company which owns a domain, they should be expected to carry
out the appropriate legal due process.

WHOIS data is already heavily harvested for spamming domain owners via
email, phone calls, texts and post. There are already so many cases where
personal details of people with a larger online presence have been used
maliciously to harass them, from ordering pizza to making terrorist
threats. Any operator of a website that may be even slightly controversial
(albeit perfectly legal) would be completely open to personal abuse.

I'd also like to express my concern about the Whois Accuracy Program (WAP).
It seems to be an absolutely horrible solution to the problem, which will
cause many people pain. Contacting people via email, to confirm their email
address, after that very email address bounced emails is guaranteed to fail
and cause unexpected terminations of domains! EasyDNS have covered many of
the issues:
http://blog.easydns.org/2014/01/21/icann-unleashes-deadliest-ddos-attack-vector-of-2014/

Thanks,
Jack Tench
ARCADEPANIC.COM