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Whois privacy reforms incoming

Kevin Murphy, May 6, 2015, 16:18:56 (UTC), Domain Policy

Whois privacy services will become regulated by ICANN under proposals published today, but there’s a big disagreement about whether all companies should be allowed to use them.
A working group has released the first draft of its recommendations covering privacy and proxy services, which mask the identity and contact details of domain registrants.
The report says that P/P services should be accredited by ICANN much like registrars are today.
Registrars should be obliged to disclose which such services they operate or are affilated with, presumably at the risk of their Registrar Accreditation Agreement if they do not comply, the report recommends.
A highlight of the paper is a set of proposed rules governing the release of private Whois data when it is requested by intellectual property interests.
Under the proposed rules, privacy services would not be allowed to reject such requests purely because the alleged infringement deals with the content of a web site rather than just the domain.
So the identity of a private registrant of a non-infringing domain would be vulnerable to disclosure if, for example, the domain hosted bootleg content.
Registrars would be able to charge IP owners a nominal “cost recovery” fee in order to process requests and would be able to ignore spammy automated requests that did not appear to have been manually vetted.
There’d be a new arbitration process that would kick in to resolve disputes between IP interests and P/P service providers.
The 98 pages of recommendations (pdf) were drafted by the Generic Names Supporting Organization’s Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Working Group (PPSAI) and opened for public comment today.
There are a lot of gaps in the report. Work, it seems, still needs to be done.
For example, it acknowledges that the working group didn’t reach any conclusions about what should happen when law enforcement agencies ask for private data.
The group was dominated by registrars and IP interests. There was only one LEA representative and only one governmental representative, and they participated in a very small number of teleconferences.
There was also a sharp division on the issue of who should be able to use privacy services, with two dissenting opinions attached to the report.
One faction, led by MarkMonitor and including Facebook, Domain Tools and fake pharmacy watchdog LegitScript, said that any company that engages in e-commerce transactions should be ineligible for privacy, saying: “Transparent information helps prevent malicious activity”.
Another group, comprising a handful of non-commercial stakeholders, said that no kind of activity should prevent you from registering a domain privately, pointing to the example of persecuted political groups using web sites to raise funds.
There was a general consensus, however, than merely being a commercial entity should not alone exclude you from using a P/P service.
Currently, registrar signatories to the 2013 RAA are bound by a temporary P/P policy that is set to expire January 2017 or whenever the P/P accreditation process starts.
There are a lot of recommendations in the report, and I’ve only touched on a handful here. The public comment period closes July 7.

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Comments (4)

  1. Andrew Allemann says:
    May 6, 2015 at 7:41 pm

    Wait a minute…MarkMonitor says companies with e-commerce shouldn’t be able to use whois privacy? MarkMonitor is one of the biggest providers of whois proxy with its DNStinations business.

    Reply
    • Kevin Murphy says:
      May 6, 2015 at 8:09 pm

      I considered that, but are the domains with the MarkMonitor privacy actually transacting, or are they usually just defensives or portfolio domains?

      Reply
  2. Max Fein says:
    May 7, 2015 at 7:19 pm

    “Transparent information helps prevent malicious activity”
    Seriously could not have said it betterer =)
    open and accurate whois makes a the interwebs awesomer! as an entreprewhatever can see sense in running silent for a while, yet really… imho, no one is actually watching to swoop on your idea unless ‘you’ are a huge company and generally open=better in any case.
    if you’re a regular person then get a p.o. box and a voip phone number and you’re good to go =)

    Reply

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