Re: [alac] DRAFT: Impact statement on WHOIS. COMMENT BEFORE TUESDAY.

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003 08:47:33 +0100, you wrote:

>The e-mail part of this is already in there.  The phone calls and
>postal letters are something against which registrars will
>vehemently be opposed, since it's not automatable, and causes cost
>they may not be able to recover.  That's the translation for
>"unimplementable" these days.

That's true... but what if the e-mail is the only non-functioning or
wrong part in the contact data? You create a very dangerous single
point of failure, which might not even be under the registrant's
control (what if, for example, your e-mail provider loses the message
or filters it out because of some badly configured spam prevention
software or whatever else?). The registrant has paid the registrar
some money for the domain, and this should cover at least the cost of
one international phone call.

>I don't want to disgress, but even privacy commissioners in Europe
>have already accepted some kind of WHOIS service in the past.  For
>instance, the current form of the .de WHOIS is the result of a
>compromise between the relevant privacy commissioner and the
>registry.

But the EU privacy directive gives you some clear rights about that...
My contacts with the Italian privacy commissioner say that WHOIS is in
their opinion quite openly illegal, and that while some degree of
WHOIS service could be made mandatory, you should at least have a
simple and free way to disclose your identity to the registry only.

Oh well... it's law... I guess nothing will be clear until someone
takes the case into courts, and even then two different judges might
rule differently.
-- 
vb.                  [Vittorio Bertola - vb [at] bertola.eu.org]<---
-------------------> http://bertola.eu.org/ <-----------------------