.Net privacy and seizures

[Tony Lowe <tonylowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To whom it may concern:

I fully agree with the unparalleled Cory Doctorow when he states:

To whom it may concern:
I am a co-owner and co-editor of BoingBoing.net, owned by Happy Mutants, LLC, 
on whose behalf I write today. I am writing to express Happy Mutants' 
objections to the comments filed by the Intellectual Property Constituency, 
available here:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/net-agreement-renewal/pdfTeYfTqqAOg.pdf
==
1. DOMAIN SEIZURES DON'T WORK AND ARE DISPROPORTIONATE
The past year has seen ample evidence that domain seizures don't work. The 
extrajudicial, streamlined rough justice that the IPC and its members advocate 
resulted in the erroneous seizure of 80,000 websites and their replacement with 
an incorrect warning that they had previously hosted child pornography.
http://boingboing.net/2011/02/17/dhs-erroneously-seiz.html
Meanwhile, practically every site seized went back up immediately. Of course, 
some of the seized sites had been found legal in their local courts, so it's 
not surprising:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/do-domain-seizures-keep-streaming-sites-down.ars
Site operators accused of copyright infringement should be sued in the 
appropriate courts, which can issue injunctions during or after the proceeding, 
on the basis of evidence. It is not appropriate to ask Verisign to adjudicate 
technically complex copyright claims. The outcome will be similar to what we've 
seen already: overreaching claims, seizures of legitimate sites, and a 
shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach characteristic of the IPC's members.
==
2. PRIVATE DOMAIN REGISTRATION IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
Unlike Happy Mutants or the IPC, many domain registrants are private 
individuals, lacking a commercial office, PO box or other address for use in 
domain registration. Compelling registrars to publish their customers' home 
addresses on the public Internet isn't a "best practice" -- it's a privacy 
disaster in the making, a gift to identity thieves and stalkers, and anything 
but common sense. We don't publish our home addresses on the Internet, and 
neither do the people who pay the bills at the IPC. Why should everyone else be 
required to, just to save the IPC's members the trouble of securing a court 
order when they believe their rights are being infringed?
==
For these reasons, we ask that you disregard the comments of the IPC in their 
entirety.
Thank you,

Cory Doctorow
Happy Mutants, LLC

We hope that you agree with him too.

Tony
www.brokencities.com (and soon to be .net