Earlier this month, Rep. Lamar Smith (Texas), the committee's Chair and Rep. Howard L. Berman (California), the ranking Democrat wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Donald Evans raising questions about Whois issues. Noting the upcoming expiry of ICANN-Commerce MOU on Sept. 30, the Congressmen expressed their support for adding "strong intellectual property enforcement provisions in any successive MOU." That means more Whois, more enforcement of accuracy requirements, and presumably less privacy.

The two Congressmen also said that the MOU extension should be limited to one year.

Update: 08/28 19:05 GMT by Michael: Text of the letter to Sect. Evans from Reps. Smith and Berman (via Trademark Blog).

To ice the cake -- and complete the kowtow to the IP agenda -- the letter complained that not all ccTLDs violate their users' privacy American style. Some -- horrors! -- have set prohibitive Whois access policies. ICANN, they suggested, should have agreements with ccTLDs making them fall into line on whois, and cybersquatting too. "We are troubled by ICANN's apparent inability to meaningfully contribute to accountability, transparency and the establishment of a forum for the efficient resolution of domain name disputes in the formative stages of the relationship with ccTLDs," they said.

Which of course (intentionally?) misses the point that ICANN would like nothing better than to bring ccTLDs to heel, but those pesky foreigners just won't roll over and play dead.

Must be time to collect those campaign contributions...