ICANN - Respect Our Privacy

[Erik Popp <epopp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear ICANN –

Regarding the proposed rules governing companies that provide WHOIS 
privacy services (as set forth in the Privacy and Policy Services 
Accreditation Issues Policy document):
I can usually tell when a politician or bureaucrat has an ulterior 
motive, since when they are, they sell "solutions" that either don't 
solve the problem that they claim to solve, or solve it very 
inefficiently. This is one of those "solutions".
The problem is very real: criminals can get domain names, without having 
to verify who they really are.  Even though they're supposed to give 
their real contact info when they sign up, they can lie. They can then 
scam people, and it's hard for most people to tell the difference 
between legitimate businesses and fakes. But forcing everyone to remove 
privacy services, and publicize their real contact info in the whois 
database doesn't fix that. The data is still available, it's just 
limited to those with a court order. I argue that it should stay that way.
The problem with forcing everyone to publish their real contact info in 
a public database is that it makes life easier for spammers. They can 
grab the real contact info of everyone who owns a domain.
If you're trying to protect people from scams, and make criminals' lives 
harder, good. But find another way to do it - one that doesn't do more 
harm than good.