No Verfügungsanspruch for ICANN in GDPR lawsuit

ICANN has lost its latest attempt to use the German courts to force Tucows to continue to collect Whois records the registrar thinks are unnecessary.

In an August 1 ruling, a translation of which (pdf) has been published by ICANN, the court ruled that no preliminary injunction (or “Verfügungsanspruch”) was necessary, because ICANN has not shown it would suffer irreparable harm without one.

ICANN wants Tucows’ German subsidiary EPAG to carry on collecting the Admin-C and Tech-C fields of Whois, even though the registrar thinks that would make it fall foul of Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation.

The organization has already had two adverse decisions at a lower court, and the appeals court‘s latest ruling does not change anything. The judge ruled:

The Applicant [ICANN] has already not demonstrated that a preliminary injunction is required in order to avoid substantial disadvantages. To the extent the Applicant submitted in its application that interim relief was necessary in order to avert irreparable harm by arguing that the data to be collected would otherwise be irretrievably lost, this is not convincing. The Defendant [EPAG] could at a later point collect this data from the respective domain holder by a simple inquiry, provided that an obligation in this regard should be established.

The court also declined to refer the case to the European Court of Justice, as ICANN had wanted, because nothing in the ruling required GDPR to be interpreted.

This a a blow, because the whole point of the lawsuit is for ICANN and registrars to get some clarity on what the hell GDPR actually requires when it comes to Whois.

ICANN said it is “considering its next steps, including possible additional filings before the German courts”, noting that the “main proceedings” of the case are still ahead of it.

auDA car crash continues as director quits over foreign members

auDA director Tim Connell has quit the board over its decision to admit almost a thousand new members from the industry side of the house.

Connell, the only remaining elected “Demand class” director, said he believes auDA will now be controlled by registrars and the new back-end registry, Afilias.

In his resignation letter (pdf), Connell said: “I fear this potentially hands control of auDA over to industry and could ultimately create the situation where the independent governing body is no longer independent.”

The new member influx, which saw the ranks swell from about 320 to over 1,300 in the space of a few weeks, was largely due to three large registrars and the back-end encouraging their staff to sign up for membership.

One registrar, CrazyDomains owner Dreamscape Networks, now apparently employs almost 40% of auDA’s members.

auDA, which seems to have nudged the companies towards this membership drive, is under pressure from the Australian government to grow and diversify its membership.

Chief critic Josh Rowe, himself a former director, has calculated, based on a non-public member list, that most of the new members are based outside of Australia, a fact alluded to by Connell in his letter.

Rowe and his fellow “Grumpies” used last month’s extraordinary auDA meeting to demand that the new membership applications be rejected on the grounds that the new members are not a part of the Australian internet community that auDA is constitutionally bound to serve.

But auDA chair Chris Leptos responded that they are members of the community by virtue of their employment.

Connell’s primary concern appears to be that the swollen member base is now heavily tilted in favor of the supply-side of the community.

He noted that an AUD 12 million marketing fund distributed to registrars in the wake of the migration to cheaper back-end Afilias could be seen as an attempt to bribe the industry to side with the auDA party line.

Grumpies have accused auDA of “cartel-like” behavior in this regard.

At the special meeting two weeks ago, motions to fire three directors including Leptos (over unrelated disagreements) were rejected due to near-unanimous opposition from the Supply-class members, despite an overall majority of voters supporting their removal.

The new members were not eligible to vote at that meeting, so the Supply-class was considerably smaller.

At the same meeting, Connell revealed that his Demand-class directorship had recently come into question due to the fact that he acted as an affiliate of a registrar.

He said he’d rectified that situation, and Leptos seemed happy with that the situation had been resolved.

Despite this, Connell says in his letter that he no longer feels that information he receives as a director is “accurate or complete”, suggesting continued tensions on the board.

For all these reasons, he said he was resigning immediately.

In a statement, auDA thanked Connell for his service and said a replacement will be sought within three months.

I’ve actually lost count of how many auDA directors have quit recently. I’ve reported on at least five, including the last chair, since I started covering the unrest there a little over a year ago.

New ICANN director named

A member of the root server community has been named to the ICANN board of directors.

The Nominating Committee yesterday revealed its three selections for the board, two of whom are already seated.

The new director is Tripti Sinha of the University of Maryland, where she heads the Advanced Cyber Infrastructure and Internet Global Services division, which manages the D-root server.

Sinha is currently co-chair of ICANN’s Root Server System Advisory Committee.

She will replace fellow North American George Sadowsky who, after joining the board in 2009 and being reselected twice, is term-limited and will be given his marching orders this October.

NomCom also reaffirmed current directors Lousewies van der Laan, a former Dutch politician, and Rafael “Lito” Ibarra, founder of the El Salvadorean ccTLD .sv.

New directors will take their seats at the conclusion of the ICANN 63 meeting in Barcelona in October.

NomCom’s other selections to various leadership positions at ICANN can be found here.

Fight over Whois access starts early

Starting as they mean to go on? The new ICANN working group on Whois this week saw early, if predictable, divisions on the issue of access to private data in a post-GDPR world.

The so-called Whois EPDP (for Expedited Policy Development Process) held its first teleconference on Wednesday and while not really getting around to the nitty-gritty of policy managed to quickly start squabbling about its schedule and rules of engagement.

It’s already not looking promising that blanket cross-community consensus is going to be reached in the time permitted.

The group is tasked with turning the current Temporary Specification for Whois, which was created by the ICANN board of directors, into a formal consensus policy that in principle has the support of the whole community.

Group chair Kurt Pritz laid out three targets for the group.

First up is a “triage” document, which will basically see the community decide, line by line, what it likes and does not like about the Temp Spec.

In theory, the EPDP could just rubber-stamp the whole shebang and be done with it, but that’s highly unlikely.

Second is an Initial Report, which will include the agreements reached in the triage document and the agreements reached in subsequent discussions.

That’s due in October at ICANN’s meeting in Barcelona, which is ambitious but not necessarily impossible.

The Temp Spec was written with guidance from lawyers and European data protection authorities, so there’s a limit to how far the EPDP can stray, in my view.

Thirdly, and most controversially, is an “Initial Report outlining a proposed model of a system for providing accredited access to non-public Registration Data.”

This is the proposed standardized system that will allow security and intellectual property interests, and possibly others, to see unredacted Whois data like we all could just a few months ago.

Many stakeholder groups are in favor of such a system, but the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group are decidedly not.

The NCSG, given voice principally by academic Milton Mueller, objected to the Pritz/ICANN plan to start soliciting comments on access from the EPDP group later this month, before the group has come to consensus on the so-called “gating questions”.

The gating questions are rather less thorny issues such as whether the purposes registrars collect personal data as mandated by the Temp Spec are in fact legitimate under the GDPR and what data should be transferred from registrars to their registries.

Mueller said that the gating issues represent a “crisis situation” — the EPDP group has just a few months to come to consensus on which parts of the Temp Spec it agrees with — and that discussions about access can be safely pushed back until later.

Perhaps predicting an impasse in future, he also warned Pritz not to over-sell the level of consensus the group reaches if there are still dissenting voices at the end of the process.

Mueller yesterday told the group that NCSG — there are six members on the EPDP team — will refuse to engage on the access issue until consensus had been found on the gating issues.

But NCSG faced push-back from pro-access groups including the Business Constituency, Governmental Advisory Committee and At-Large Advisory Committee.

Alan Greenberg of the ALAC said access talks are “really important” and intertwined with the gating questions. Groups may change their positions on one set of questions based on the discussions of the other, he said.

As it stands today, the group has been asked to fill out four sets of questionnaires, polling their support for various parts of the Temp Spec, over the next few weeks.

The controversial fourth questionnaire covers the access model, but ICANN staff facilitating the group have assured the NCSG these responses will be essentially sat on until the working group is ready to address them.

The group is planning twice-weekly teleconferences in its effort to get its first and second deliverables ready in time for Barcelona.

These 33 people will decide the future of Whois

The names of the people who will decide the future of global gTLD Whois policy have been revealed.

Twenty-nine of 33 open seats of the GNSO’s Expedited Policy Development Process on the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data are now filled and their occupants known.

The EPDP group is tasked with, in just a few short months, coming up with a permanent replacement for ICANN’s Temporary Specification for Whois in a post-GDPR world.

While 33 might seem like a lot of people, it’s a far cry from the over 100 involved in previous Whois working groups, kept deliberately small in order to meet the EPDP’s aggressive deadlines.

As you might expect, there are some members that we can safely rely on to fight for an interpretation of GDPR weighted heavily towards privacy rights, balanced against many others who will certainly fight for “legitimate purposes” data access rights for law enforcement, security and intellectual property interests.

The makeup of the group is heavily North American, with hardly any representation from Asia or Latin America.

By my count, there are 17 members from North America, seven people based in Europe (one of whom represents the Iranian government), two Africans, and one body each from Australia, Japan, and Argentina.

Contrary to the EPDP charter, and DI’s previous coverage, there are no members of the ccNSO on the group. It also appears as if the two seats reserved for root server operators will go unfilled.

As previously reported, the group is being chaired by Kurt Pritz, who works for the .art registry operator but is best known as a former ICANN senior VP.

These are the other members, grouped by their respective factions.

Registries Stakeholder Group

Alan Woods. He’s Donuts’ senior policy and compliance manager and has been since 2014. Donuts is of course the registry with the largest portfolio of commercial, open gTLDs, running about 300 of them.

Marc Anderson. Verisign’s product manager in charge of systems including SRS and Whois. Whatever policy is ultimately handed down, he’ll be in charge of implementing it at .com and .net, among other TLDs. As the only major example of a “thin” gTLD registry operator, Verisign handles a lot less personal data than any other gTLD registry.

Kristina Rosette. She’s a lawyer with a background in IP, working for Amazon, which holds a portfolio of gTLDs most of which remain unlaunched. An example of the GNSO’s ongoing game of musical chairs, she used to be a leading voice in the Intellectual Property Constituency.

Registrars Stakeholder Group

James Bladel. Vice president of global policy at GoDaddy, which in its implementation of GDPR has erred towards publishing more data, not less. As the largest registrar, GoDaddy is a rare example of a registrar with the resources to make its implementation more granular, allowing it to differentiate between EU and non-EU customers and continue to have a value proposition for its paid-for privacy services.

Matt Serlin. Formerly with brand protection registrar MarkMonitor, he’s the founder of startup rival BrandSight. It probably goes without saying that the brand protection side of the RrSG does not necessarily have the same interests as retail registrars. GDPR does not affect big trademark-holding corporations in terms of their own Whois records (GDPR only applies to “natural persons”), but it does affect their ability to go after cybersquatters.

Emily Taylor. As well as a policy consultant and a former Nominet bigwig, she’s a director of the small UK registrar Netistrar but says “my business interests also cover intellectual property / brand protection, and non-commercial interests such as freedom of expression, privacy and human rights”. She chaired an earlier Whois Review Team, which published a report in 2012 that was ultimately basically ignored by ICANN

Intellectual Property Constituency

Alex Deacon. While recently independent, he still represents the Motion Picture Association of America, one of the biggest copyright interests out there and until April his direct employer.

Diane Plaut. Seemingly a relative newcomer to ICANN, she’s “Global General Counsel and Data Protection and Privacy Officer” for a company called Corsearch, which provides database services for trademark owners. In an April blog post, she wrote that it is “essential” that trademark owners should continue to have access to private Whois data.

Business Constituency

Margie Milam. Head of domain strategy at Facebook, which is currently lobbying ICANN to start forcing registrars to reveal private data to trademark interests, as we reported last week.

Mark Svancarek. Newly installed as “Principal Program Manager – Tech Policy / Internet Governance” at Microsoft, which has said that it thinks privacy is a “fundamental human right”. Make no mistake, however, Microsoft reckons Whois data should carry on being made available to those investigating cybercrime or intellectual property infringement, as it outlined in a recent letter to ICANN (pdf).

Internet Service and Connection Providers Constituency

Esteban Lescano. Partner at the Argentinian law firm Lescano & Etcheverry, which counts online trademark protection as one of many areas of specialization, he’s also director of the policy and legal affairs committee at trade group CABASE, the Argentine Internet Association.

Thomas Rickert. Lawyer Rickert is head of domains at German trade group eco, but perhaps more significantly his law firm is representing Tucows subsidiary EPAG in its lawsuit with ICANN, in which ICANN accuses EPAG of breaching its contract by threatening to stop collecting certain Whois data elements. He’s very much on the pro-privacy side of the debate.

Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group

Stephanie Perrin. President of her own company, Digital Discretion, she consults on privacy issues. Unambiguously on the pro-privacy side of the house.

Ayden Ferdeline. A Germany-based independent consultant, Ferdeline is, like Perrin, firmly pro-privacy.

Milton Mueller. An ICANN veteran, Mueller is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founder of the Internet Governance Project. About as pro-privacy as it gets.

Johan “Julf” Helsingius. Chairman of BaseN, an “internet of things” services provider, Helsingus has form when it comes to privacy protection. His Wikipedia entry is dominated by his pro-privacy activities, including a 1996 fight against the Church of Scientology, which wanted him to reveal the identities of his customers.

Amr Elsadr. Egyptian consultant Elsadr also has a track record of talking up privacy rights at ICANN.

Farzaneh Badiei. Executive director at the Internet Governance Project and researcher at Georgia Tech, Badiei, alongside colleagues Mueller and Ferdeline, has been regularly vocal about the need for privacy in Whois.

Governmental Advisory Committee

Georgios Tselentis. As the representative of the European Commission, one might reasonably expect Tselentis to be rather pro-GDPR.

Ashley Heineman. She represents the US on the GAC. The US is very strongly of the belief that Whois access should be reinstated for intellectual property and security interests.

Kavouss Arasteh. Iran’s GAC rep, we could be looking at the WG’s deadline wild card here. I’ve no idea what Iran’s position is on GDPR, but there are few topics at ICANN upon which Arasteh has not spoken strongly, and at length.

At-Large Advisory Committee

Alan Greenberg. He chairs the ALAC, which is in favor of a well-regulated accreditation program that allows law enforcement and IP interests to access Whois.

Hadia Elminiawi. Elminiawi works at the National Telecom Regulatory Authority of Egypt. She did not vote on the ALAC position paper on Whois/GDPR.

Security and Stability Advisory Committee

Benedict Addis. Formerly in UK law enforcement, Addis chairs the Registrar of Last Resort, a non-profit registrar that quarantines abusive domain names.

Ben Butler. Director of global policy at GoDaddy, focused on abuse, I wouldn’t expect his position to differ wildly from that of colleague Bladel.

Root Server System Advisory Committee

While two seats have been reserved for the RSSAC, the committee has not yet put any bodies forward to occupy them, presumably because the root server operators don’t collect personal data from registrants and don’t really have a horse in this race.

Liaisons

The ICANN board of directors has two liaisons on the WG — Chris Disspain and Leon Felipe Sanchez. The GNSO Council liaison is Rafik Dammak. There are expected to be two ICANN staff liaisons, but they have not yet been named.

The EPDP mailing list opened up yesterday and will hold its first teleconference tomorrow.