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Whois working group imploding in GDPR’s wake

Kevin Murphy, May 14, 2018, 15:04:48 (UTC), Domain Policy

An ICANN working group devoted to Whois policy is looking increasingly dead after being trumped by incoming European Union privacy law.
Registration Data Services PDP working group chair Chuck Gomes threw in the towel late last week, resigning from the group shortly after cancelling proposed face-to-face meetings scheduled for the Panama ICANN meeting in June.
That followed his announcement last month that the WG’s teleconferences were to be put on hold while ICANN works out how to respond to the General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into effect May 25, 11 days from now.
The WG had been working on ICANN’s future Whois policy since November 2015 but faced the usual impasses that occur whenever the various sides of the ICANN community face off over privacy.
Gomes, a former Versign executive who retired almost a year ago but stuck around to chair the RDS group, said he’d originally expected its work to wrap up in 2017.
Now, with GDPR rendering much of the discussions moot, there’s a feeling among some WG volunteers that they’ve been wasting their time.
ICANN’s response to GDPR is expected to be an emergency, top-down policy, written by staff and approved by the board, that would stay in place for a year.
The GNSO would then have a year to rally the community, under its own emergency procedures, to make formal policy to replace it for the long term.
There’s an open question about whether the RDS WG could be re-purposed to take on this task, but it’s my sense it’s more likely that a new group would be formed.
It may prove more challenging to recruit volunteers to such a group given the experiences of the RDS crowd.
Gomes, a long-time ICANN veteran and former GNSO Council chair, plans to spend more time travelling around in his RV with his wife. We wish them well.

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Comments (3)

  1. Eric Brunner-Williams says:
    May 15, 2018 at 5:35 am

    kudus to chuck for having stuck this one out for so long!

    Reply
  2. Richard Funden says:
    May 15, 2018 at 11:34 am

    So if the GNSO were to blow the board off and fail to create a replacement policy, the temporary policy would run out after a year? Madness!

    Reply
    • Rubens Kuhl says:
      May 16, 2018 at 1:33 pm

      One of the unknowns is whether a temporary policy comes with “double jeopardy”, so it couldn’t be reissued after a year, or not.

      Reply

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