Re: [gnso-dow123] Proposal Premise Presupposes Publication

[Wendy Seltzer <wendy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 01:13:31PM -0400, Ross Rader wrote:
> Procedural concerns aside, I'm beginning to believe that this proposal
> is rooted in a very flawed assumption, specifically that;
>
> Privacy is a privilege.
...
> Jordyn indicates that no other options were looked at - I'd like to
> press on this a bit. It appears that the task force is attempting to use
> an exception based approached to deal with regional breakouts of
> privacyitis. Doesn't it make much more sense to offer registrants these
> types of protections on a much more global basis by enhancing the
> capability of registrars and registries by implementing privacy policies
> specifically targetted at individuals?
>
> There are any number of ways that we could seek to address the needs to
> those who wish to be contacted with the needs of those who don't want to
> be contacted and most certainly, balance the legitimate interests of
> those seeking an additional level of disclosure because of operational
> or legal concerns.
>
> The proposal, as it stands, seems overly intent on dealing with symptoms
> that future policy implementations might possibly avoid if the GNSO took
> a more progressive stance on Whois policy and individual privacy rights.
>
> For these reasons, I'm not inclined to support this proposal in advance
> of actually dealing with the privacy rights and disclosure obligations
> found in ICANN's whois policy.

Thanks Ross.  It would indeed be better to address the underlying issues in a way that gives registrants privacy no matter in what country their registrar is located.  There's no reason privacy should become a jurisdictionally based competitive advantage.  

I think these issues have come to the fore right now because it's taken some in ICANN a long time to recognize any privacy interest, and the requirements of national laws help to focus attention.  It would be terrific if now that (some) attention is being paid, we could offer registrants a more comprehensive privacy protection.  

--Wendy


--
Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@xxxxxxxxxxx || wendy@xxxxxxx
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html
Chilling Effects: http://www.chillingeffects.org/

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