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ICANN - Respect Our Privacy

  • To: comments-ppsai-initial-05may15@xxxxxxxxx
  • Subject: ICANN - Respect Our Privacy
  • From: Erik Popp <epopp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2015 21:55:00 +0000 (UTC)

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):

I can usually tell when a politician or bureaucrat has an ulterior motive, since when they are, they sell "solutions" that either don't solve the problem that they claim to solve, or solve it very inefficiently. This is one of those "solutions".

The problem is very real: criminals can get domain names, without having to verify who they really are. Even though they're supposed to give their real contact info when they sign up, they can lie. They can then scam people, and it's hard for most people to tell the difference between legitimate businesses and fakes. But forcing everyone to remove privacy services, and publicize their real contact info in the whois database doesn't fix that. The data is still available, it's just limited to those with a court order. I argue that it should stay that way.

The problem with forcing everyone to publish their real contact info in a public database is that it makes life easier for spammers. They can grab the real contact info of everyone who owns a domain.

If you're trying to protect people from scams, and make criminals' lives harder, good. But find another way to do it - one that doesn't do more harm than good.



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