WHOIS Report Punts on Privacy

You mention that business identification is usually available to the public. Two points on that:

1. Many domain name registrations, even those in .com, are not used for business purposes at all. If publication of whois data is based on business activity then that foundation doesn't exist for those names used for non commercial purposes.

2. In nearly every State of the US many businesses organized as corporations can, and do, hide the identity of their principals. For example, here in California a closely held corporation (i.e. owned by only a few people) takes a bit of effort to penetrate. Another state, Delaware, allows even bigger corporations to act with a degree of anonanimity. And of course, with corporate hierarchies, with corporations owning corporations, particularly if some are foreign, it can be exceedingly impenetrable.

But back to the basic issue of why whois should be private.

Having a domain name is one of the keys to becoming a sophisticated user of the net - something beyond the typical AOL level of userhood. And as the net moves beyond being a toy and is integrated into peoples lives, having this beyond-AOL status will become increasingly useful to whatever activities that people chose to do.

So we can't dismiss this issue of privacy any longer on the basis that it is an issue relevant only to a few.

Among the widely accepted general principles of privacy are principles that data ought to be collected only for a specific purpose (in this case DNS registration.) Another principal is that data ought to be used only for that purpose (i.e. not to be used by spammers or trademark people - those are not uses consistent with the purpose for which the data was gathered.) That latter principal is violated by publication of whois to just anybody who wants to take a peek.

There is indeed usefulness in whois data - but there ought to be some pre-conditions to obtaining access.

First is that the person who wants to take a look ought to leave a calling card - an identity, contact information, and some authenticator so that we can believe the identity and contact. With the possible exception of law enforcement access, this information ought to be available to the data subject - it is reasonable for someone to know who has been peeking at their data.

Second, the person who wants to take a look must demonstrate that there is a legitimate reason for him/her to take a peek. This can be mechanised to make it easy for those who tend to know in advance that they will need to occassionally take a look - for instance, ISP people in operations centers can have pre-arranged credentials that serve to both identify and to indicate that the person acts ina role in which access is usually well grounded.

In the case of trademark people - their desire to access is based on an accusation that the data subject is engaged in unlawful use of a domain name. To my mind that kind of accusation requires that they demonstrate to a neutral magistrate with actual proofs of actual acts that their trademark rights are being harmed and that there is a reasonable basis to believe that the harm comes from the accused domain name.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:As it always was by KarlAuerbach

Re:As it always was
by dtobias (dan@tobias.name) on Thursday February 06 2003, @05:15PM (#11106)
User #2967 Info | http://domains.dan.info/

Well, it has always been my position that .com domains are intended for commercial use, and any other use of them is really abuse.

While I oppose any attempt to retroactively impose any sort of registration restrictions on .com, .net, or .org, since doing this to a currently open-registration domain would be impractical and unfair (I said this back when the possibility of .org restrictions was "in the air", and still hold this position), I do support the tailoring of policies for the different TLDs to the type of users for which they are intended.

Thus, .com should have policies appropriate for commercial use, such as requiring public WHOIS information, while a TLD intended specifically for individuals (e.g., .name) deserves a much more privacy-friendly policy.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:As it always was by KarlAuerbach Thursday February 06 2003, @07:15PM
Re:As it always was by tbyfield Thursday February 06 2003, @08:36PM
- Re:As it always was by dmehus Friday February 07 2003, @09:23AM

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