WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report

["Neil Schwartzman" <neil@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thank-you for the opportunity CAUCE to comment on the WHOIS Review Team Final 
Report date 5 December 2011.  

We believe that overall, the report is fine, it accurately describes the 
current WHOIS situation.  

The fundamental problem from our perspective is that ICANN has never faced up 
to the regulatory role that its contracts with registries, registrars, and 
registrants require. As has been noted often, including several times by CAUCE 
members directly to ICANN, accurate registrant data is a key resource for 
fighting crime and abuse, by both law enforcement and by responsible Internet 
businesses including CAUCE and its member organizations and individuals.

The recommendations lay out an achievable path to a WHOIS that meets the needs 
of the Internet community. 

We understand that some domains are registered by individuals with legitimate 
privacy concerns, but the vast majority are registered by organizations, not 
individuals.  It should not be difficult to protect individual registrants, 
while still allowing the organizations' data to be fully available for the 
benefit of all Internet users.

While we concur with all 20 of the recommendations, we have some concern that 
the length of the list makes it less likely that any individual recommendation 
will be implemented.  Hence we encourage ICANN and the WRT to group the 
recommendations by priority.  

The very highest priority is #1; creating a single well-defined registrant data 
policy.  

To support that, to us, the next priorities include #3, providing adequate 
support to compliance efforts, #8, creating enforcable contracts and enforcing 
them, and #10 and #16, clarifying the roles of privacy and proxy services.

The rest of the recommendation, while important, are less criticial.  We are 
not suggesting that lower priority be deferred or wait for higher priorities to 
be complete, but rather that ICANN's leadership focus its limited time on the 
highest priorities.
--
Neil Schwartzman
Executive Director
CAUCE - the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
Tel: (303) 800-6345
Web: http://cauce.org
Twitter: @cauce