RE: [gnso-whois-wg] Iintroduction to the WHOIS working group

["Fares, David" <DFares@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Below is my response to the Statement of Interest:

1. Current occupation, employer and position

I am VP, E-commerce Policy at News Corporation.

2. Type of work performed in 1 above

I handle the international government and regulatory affairs for the company.

3. Financial ownership or management leadership of registries, registrars or 
other firms that are interested parties in Whois

I do not have any interest in a provider of domain name services.

4. Nature of your interest in Whois

News Corporation is a user of the Whois database, including for IP, network 
security and other business concerns.


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gnso-whois-wg@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-gnso-whois-wg@xxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of GNSO.SECRETARIAT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 1:18 PM
To: gnso-whois-wg@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: [gnso-whois-wg] Iintroduction to the WHOIS working group

Dear Member of the Whois Working Group,

Thank you very much for your interest in participating in the Whois
Working Group of the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) of ICANN.

The GNSO Council has appointed Philip Sheppard as the Interim Chair of
the WG.


*First conference call: *
The Whois Working Group will meet by conference call at  1200 UTC
next Wednesday, 25 April for 45 minutes to one hour. You will be
sent information with dial-in details directly, i.e. not by published
mailing list.

*Essential information:*
  Below is the Charter of this Working Group which sets out essential
information about the group's task and how it will operate. It also
includes basic background information on Whois. I will shortly be
sending you a 'Backgrounder' on Whois with further background
information.

To find the main page of the GNSO, please take the following route which
will also show you further information about ICANN:
go to www.icann.org
<http://www.icann.org>,
on the top menu, click on 'structure' which
brings you to a diagram of the ICANN structure,
click on 'gnso' which will bring you to the GNSO home page.

The following are useful GNSO related links on the ICANN website:
All minutes, dates of meetings and MP3 recordings of GNSO calls
http://gnso.icann.org/calendar/

Draft documents are posted at: http://gnso.icann.org/drafts/

Whois information including the Working Group Charter can be found here:
http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/

The general GNSO mailing list archives are available at:
http://www.gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists

Please find the archives of this Working Group at
http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-whois-wg

General GNSO correspondence and presentations are available here:
http://gnso.icann.org/correspondence/


*Working Group Requirements:*
Members of this Working Group are required to fulfil the following:

- Provide a Statement of Interest before contributing to the WG
- Familiarise themselves with the WG Charter and Backgrounder, including
Whois-related terminology
- Make good faith efforts to attend all conference calls, and monitor
and contribute to the mailing list(s) (NB: ICANN does not support phone
or other costs
   associated with this WG.)
- Contribute substantively to the work of this group in a constructive way
- Maintain expected standards of civility and decorum in all
interactions regarding the WG

*Statements of Interest:*
To contribute to group discussions by phone or mailing list, you must
have submitted a full Statement of Interest which will be published by
ICANN in connection with the work outcomes of this group.

Please send your Statement of Interest directly to the Working Group
List, gnso-whois-wg@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:gnso-whois-wg@xxxxxxxxx>, by  24
April, 2007, responding fully to the following questions:


1. Current occupation, employer and position

2. Type of work performed in 1 above

3. Financial ownership or management leadership of
registries, registrars or other firms that are interested parties in Whois

4. Nature of your interest in Whois


Please be aware that in fulfilment of ICANN's requirements for openness
and transparency, all emails sent to the Working Group mailing list will
be published on the ICANN website:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-whois-wg/  Please do not send any
messages to the mailing list that contain personal data, e.g. address or
phone numbers.

*ICANN staff support*
This Working Group is supported by the following ICANN staff members:

Glen de Saint Gery, GNSO Secretariat,

and

Maria Farrell, GNSO Policy Officer, tel. +32 2 234 78 70 (ICANN Brussels
office)

Please contact us if you have any questions.

Looking forward to working with you,

Glen de Saint Gery and Maria Farrell


Whois Working Group Charter
http://www.gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/whois-wg/whois-working-group-charter-16apr07.pdf

Approved by the GNSO Council on 16 April, 2007

STATUS OF THIS DOCUMENT

This is the FINAL Whois Working Group Charter agreed following the GNSO
Council meeting on 12 April, 2007.


SUMMARY

This document sets out the essential information regarding the ICANN
Whois Working Group created by the GNSO Council on 28 March, 2007. It
includes that Working Group's objectives, work plan and methods,
timeline, information on participation and decision-making and basic
background information regarding ICANN and Whois.



1   Introduction

The GNSO Council voted on 28 March, 2007 to create a Whois Working Group
with a broad, balanced and representative membership to take the output
of the WHOIS task force and carry out further work to address concerns
raised by the community and seek to reach greater consensus around
improvements to the WHOIS service that achieve a balance between
providing contact information adequate to facilitate timely resolution
of any problems that arise in connection with the Register Name, and the
need to take reasonable precautions to protect the data about any
identified or identifiable natural person from loss, misuse,
unauthorized access or disclosure, alteration, or destruction.

2   Objective

The objective of the WG is to examine the issues raised with respect to
the policy recommendations contained in section 4 of the Whois Task
Force (Final Task Force Report on Whois Services[1])and make
recommendations concerning how those policy recommendations may be
improved to address these issues.

3   Participation

The WG will allow for new insights regarding this issue, with people
drawn from the GNSO, members of the GAC, government agencies (such as
law enforcement agencies), and the broader community.

The membership of this WG extends to the following:

Nominating Committee appointed GNSO councilors
GNSO constituency members
In addition, observers and liaisons may join the working group on the
following basis:



Observers shall not be members of or entitled to vote on the working
group, but otherwise shall be entitled to participate on equal footing
with members of the working group.  Observers will be able to join and
participate in the mailing list(s), and attend teleconferences or
physical meetings.



Observers must provide their real name, organization (if associated with
an organization) and contact details to the GNSO secretariat, and the
GNSO secretariat will verify at least their email address and phone
contact information. Observers will also be requested to provide a
public statement of interest, as for working group members.



The GNSO Council has appointed Philip Sheppard as the Interim Chair of
the WG and the working group can elect a chair at its first meeting.

4   Work Plan

The WG will report back to the GNSO Council by 30 July on the following
tasks:



4a        Define the roles, responsibilities, and requirements of the
contacts available for unrestricted public query-based access, and what
happens if the responsibilities are not fulfilled.



4b.       Determine how and which legitimate third parties may access
registration data that is no longer available for unrestricted, public,
query-based access.





4c        Determine whether and how a distinction could be made between
the registration contact information published based on the nature of
the registered name holder (for example, legal vs. natural persons) or
its use of the domain name (for example, commercial versus
non-commercial use).

5   Working Methods

The WG will work using the following methods:

·         Teleconferences, likely to be once a week

·         Wiki / other participatory forum or platform for group
decision-making

·         Face to face meeting at ICANN Puerto Rico meeting, 25-29 June,
2007 (remote participation in this meeting will be supported).

·         Email list

6   Decision-making

The WG will operate using a rough consensus approach. The WG will work
to achieve agreement on positions that most or all of the group members
are willing to support.

For the expression of views, the Working Group will use the following
conventions:

-           Agreement -  there is broad agreement within the Working
Group (largely equivalent to "rough consensus" as used in the IETF)

-           Support -  there is some gathering of positive opinion, but
competing positions may exist and broad agreement has not been reached

-           Alternative view - a differing opinion that has been
expressed, without garnering enough following within the WG to merit the
notion of either Support or Agreement.



Working with the group, the Chair will have the authority to establish
where agreement/support/alternative views exist.

  7   Timeline

The WG will convene within one week of the GNSO Council's agreement of
its Charter, by 20 April, 2007, latest.

The WG will work to achieve the following targets:

Produce for publication on the ICANN website a progress reports by each
of the following dates: 25 May, 2007, and 22 June, 2007.
Conclude its work and submit a final report to the GNSO Council on or
before 30 July, 2007.
If the WG has not been able to reach conclusions by 30 July, 2007, it
will terminate its work and report its outcomes to the GNSO Council by
that date.

8   Background information

A further 'Backgrounder' document has been prepared which should also be
read by Working Group members - see section 9, 'Relevant Documents', below.



Whois

ICANN's agreements with gTLD registrars and gTLD registries require them
to provide  data concerning active Registered Names via three
mechanisms: port-43 WHOIS, an interactive web page (often called WHOIS
service), and third-party bulk access. The Registrar Accreditation
Agreement (RAA) spells out which data is collected and which data is
made available.   The data includes contact information of natural
persons that includes names, postal addresses, email addresses, fax and
voice telephone numbers.





Whois Policy Development Process (PDP) of the Generic Names Supporting
Organisation (GNSO)

The GNSO is approaching the end of a policy development process (PDP) on
Whois to fulfill terms of reference agreed in June 2005[2]. The Terms of
Reference are to make policy recommendations to the ICANN Board on:

1.      The purpose of the Whois service

2.      The purpose of the Whois contacts (ie Registered Name Holder,
technical contact, and administrative contact) and the purpose for which
the data is collected.

3.      Which data should be available for public access, and determine
how to access data that is not available for public access.

4.      How to improve the process for notifying a registrar of
inaccurate data, and how to improve the process for correcting
inaccurate data.

5.      How to deal with any conflicts between the requirements of ICANN
agreements, and local or national privacy laws



Regarding Term of Reference #1, the purpose of Whois, the GNSO Council
considered the work of the Whois Task Force and passed the following
resolution on 12 April, 2006:



"The GNSO Council recommends that the WHOIS task force use the following
definition:

"The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information
sufficient to contact a responsible party for a particular gTLD domain
name who can resolve, or reliably pass on data to a party who can
resolve, issues related to the configuration of the records associated
with the domain name within a DNS nameserver."

as a working definition to allow the task force to proceed on terms of
reference (2), (3), and (4)."



In response to public input[3] received on the purpose, the GNSO Council
clarified in its meeting of 20 July 2006[4] that the definition related
to the service that provides public access to some of the data collected
by registrars, and is not a definition of the purpose of the data
collected by the registrars in the course of registering a domain name
for their customers.   The GNSO Council also agreed to take the final
report of the WHOIS task force, engage in further dialog with the
advisory committees, and consider improving the wording of the WHOIS
service definition so that it is broadly understandable.



Regarding Term of Reference #5, a Policy on conflicts between Whois
requirements and local or national privacy laws was developed by the
GNSO and approved by the Board on 10 May 2006.   A draft Procedure for
Handling Whois Conflicts with Privacy Law has been published on the
ICANN website at
(http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/whois_national_laws_procedure.htm).



Regarding Terms of Reference 2, 3 and 4, the Final Task Force Report on
Whois Services was created by the Whois Task Force and submitted to the
GNSO Council on 12 March, 2007. The Task Force Report and Staff
Discussion Points on Potential Implementation Issues are available at
http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-16mar07.htm.  The GNSO
Council met to consider the WHOIS task force report on Saturday 25 March
2007, and also met with the Government Advisory Committee.   Various
concerns were raised regarding some of the recommendations in the
report, and subsequently the GNSO Council met on Wednesday 28 March and
decided to form a working group to attempt to resolve some of the issues
raised.  The former Whois Task Force has completed its work and the
Whois Working Group is directed to develop this work as set out in this
Charter.



On 28 March, 2007, the GNSO Council voted to pass the following
resolution, creating this WG:

"The GNSO Council resolves:



1) To acknowledge the completion of the Whois TF work and note we have
received and discussed their report, and thank the task force for their work



2) To create a working group of affected stakeholders:



- including GNSO constituency, law enforcement and community participants,



- whose work is to be completed within 120 days



- that will work to examine the issues raised with respect to the policy
recommendations of the task force and make recommendations concerning
how those policies may be improved to address these issues, namely:



a. define the roles, responsibilities, and requirements of the
operational point of contact, and what happens if they are not fulfilled.



b. how legitimate interests will access registration data no longer
published via Whois,



c. whether a distinction should be made between the registration contact
information published based on the nature of the registered name holder
(for example, legal vs. natural persons) or its use of the domain name."





On 28 March, 2007, the Government Advisory Committee to the ICANN Board
produced a set of public policy principles regarding Whois[5] in line
with the recommendations of the Tunis Agenda of the World Summit on the
Information Society.  The GAC recognized that the original function of
the gTLD WHOIS service is to provide a look up service to Internet
users. As the Internet has evolved, WHOIS data is now used in support of
a number of other legitimate (subject to applicable national law)
activities, including



"1.        Supporting the security and stability of the Internet by
providing contact points for network operators and administrators,
including ISPs, and certified computer incident response teams;



2.         Allowing users to determine the availability of domain names;



3.         Assisting law enforcement authorities in investigations, in
enforcing national and international laws, including, for example,
countering terrorism-related criminal offences and in supporting
international cooperation procedures. In some countries, specialized non
governmental entities may be involved in this work;



4.         Assisting in combating against abusive uses of Information
and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as illegal and other acts
motivated by racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related
intolerance, hatred, violence, all forms of child abuse, including
paedophilia and child pornography, and trafficking in, and exploitation
of, human beings.



5.         Facilitating enquiries and subsequent steps to conduct
trademark clearances and to help counter intellectual property
infringement, misuse and theft in accordance with applicable national
laws and international treaties;



6.         Contributing to user confidence in the Internet as a reliable
and efficient means of information and communication and as an important
tool for promoting digital inclusion, e-commerce and other legitimate
uses by helping users identify persons or entities responsible for
content and services online; and



7.         Assisting businesses, other organizations and users in
combating fraud, complying with relevant laws, and safeguarding the
interests of the public."[6]



The GAC principles stated that:



-  The definition, purpose, and operation of gTLD WHOIS services should
reflect and respect the different interests and concerns outlined above.



- gTLD WHOIS services must comply with applicable national laws and
regulations.



- gTLD WHOIS services should provide sufficient and accurate data about
domain name registrations and registrants subject to national safeguards
for individuals' privacy in a manner that:



1.      Supports the stability, reliability, security, and global
interoperability of the Internet, from both a technical and public trust
perspective; and



2.       Facilitates continuous, timely and world-wide access.



- Ongoing collaboration among all relevant stakeholders who are users
of, affected by, or responsible for, maintaining WHOIS data and services
is essential to the effective implementation of these principles.



  9     Relevant Documents
Group members should at a minimum familiarize themselves with the Whois
Working Group Backgrounder distributed to the Working Group on 20 April,
2007.

The following documents are directly relevant to the work of this
Working Group and should be read by participants before joining the group:

Final Task Force Report on Whois Services, including the public comments
report on comments received on the policy proposals from November 2006 -
January 2007;
http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/whois-services-final-tf-report-12mar07.htm
 

.
Staff notes on Potential Implementation Issues;
http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois/staff-discussion-points-whois-final-15mar2007.htm
 


Government Advisory Committee Principles regarding gTLD WHOIS Services
http://gac.icann.org/web/communiques/gac27com.pdf


The email archives of this Working Group are published here:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-whois-wg/

Ongoing information and documentation on Whois is available here:

http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1]
http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/whois-services-final-tf-report-12mar07.htm
 



[2] On 2nd June 2005, the GNSO Council set the Terms of Reference for
the then Whois Task Force. Full text of the ToR is here;
http://gnso.icann.org/policies/terms-of-reference.html,

[3] 2006 Whois correspondence from organizations is archived here:
http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/correspondence.html. Whois
correspondence from governments and government agencies is archived
here: http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois-privacy/gov-input.html .

[4] http://gnso.icann.org/meetings/minutes-gnso-20jul06.shtml

[5] http://gac.icann.org/web/communiques/gac27com.pdf

[6] http://gac.icann.org/web/communiques/gac27com.pdf




-- 
Glen de Saint Géry
GNSO Secretariat - ICANN
gnso.secretariat[at]gnso.icann.org
http://gnso.icann.org


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