It's long overdue, and very welcome if it can, now, be enforced. BRAVO, ICANN! At last!"

It certainly won't be the cure, but at last it's a step in the right direction toward "accountability" for domain owners.

This coupled with our "ISP Anti-UCE Initiative" should help reduce as much as 75% of the evil spam being sent.

However the Board expresses two concerns.

I REPLY TO THE ICANN BOARD:

The board is concerned:

forcing registrants to disclose their details compromises online privacy. This will obviously not cause any particular anxiety to the intellectual property, law enforcement and consumer protection communities

WRONG.

Domain holders who's purpose is legitimate, honorable online activities will have their contact information disclosed at their web sites anyway.

Complaints will come ONLY from those engaged in unlawful, or covert activities which do not comply with the traditional ruled of netiquette (etiquette).

The board is concerned:

may well affect the business community who in the past have often suffered from a failure to keep consistent and accurate contact details for registrar/registrant communications.

NOT A CONCERN.

As with any license, registration, account or affiliation, failure to keep accurate contact information has expected ramifications. Again, those who are not serious will fall by the wayside at NO FAULT of ICANN nor the Registrar. Renewal of licensing is the license holder's obligation.

If organisations fail to respond to their domain registrar they risk their domain names being placed 'on hold' (temporarily deactivated) unless and until they provide updated information. Ultimately, the registrar has the contractual right to delete domain names where no response is received. A deactivation will result in the organisation's web site becoming unavailable

BRAVO... this is the rule we (Anti-UCE promoters) needed all along.

Those engaged in subversive, illegal, or covert activities WILL NOT return to provide accurate information -- they have no desire to be held accountable for their actions. Their intentional falsification of the Whois data is for the sole purpose of eluding discovery, identification and possible litigation. This will rid the online universe of a host of undesirable, antisocial and potentially dangerous online players. "

[Editor's Note: This came in well after April 1st, so it appears to be meant seriously. If so, I'm afraid I have to say that I think Mr. Showker has let his enthusiasm for a good cause run ahead of the facts and good sense. Karl Auerbach's musings on whois and privacy say most of what needs saying. I'll just add that the suggestion that anyone of good faith puts their contact info on their homepage could only be written by someone who (1) thinks that the web is the only Internet application that uses domain names, when in fact there are lots of domain names that are used only for other things; and (2) is utterly unaware of the possiblity that people might use a web page for things that might subject them to personal danger, including the espousal of upopular (or in some nations illegal) opinions. -mf]

The author of this story unfortunately gets part of the policy wrong. The consensus policy does not imply that non-response to the annual notice will, by itself, be reason for the cancellation of a domain name: That particular policy is about an opportunity to fix data.

On the other hand, general accuracy provisions are already part of the existing policy -- which was, in fact, part of the NCUC's earlier dilemma...

And by the way, there's no need to identify the owner of a spam-advertised website if what you want to do is just to promptly shut the domain name (and thus the website) down.

(*) Some argue that there may be cases where completely anonymous domain registration is desirable, and while I see some merit in this, I think this should be carefully limited to such cases. Accountability is necessary for any kind of legislation - and the sociopolitical system where you don't have legislation (anarchy, aka the law of the jungle) is usually not one of the best ones to live in.

--vb. (Vittorio Bertola)