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Exclusive gang of 10 to work on making ICANN the Whois gatekeeper

Kevin Murphy, December 14, 2018, 14:56:31 (UTC), Domain Services

Ten people have been picked to work on a system that would see ICANN act as the gatekeeper for private Whois data.

The organization today announced the composition of what it’s calling the Technical Study Group on Access to Non-Public Registration Data, or TSG-RD.

As the name suggests, the group is tasked with designing a system that would see ICANN act as a centralized access point for Whois data that, in the GDPR era, is otherwise redacted from public view.

ICANN said such a system:

would place ICANN in the position of determining whether a third-party’s query for non-public registration data ought to be approved to proceed. If approved, ICANN would ask the appropriate registry or registrar to provide the requested data to ICANN, which in turn would provide it to the third party. If ICANN does not approve the request, the query would be denied. 

There’s no current ICANN policy saying that the organization should take on this role, but it’s one possible output of the current Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois, which is focusing on how to bring ICANN policy into compliance with GDPR.

The new group is not going to make the rules governing who can access private Whois data, it’s just to create the technical framework, using RDAP, that could be used to implement such rules.

The idea has been discussed for several months now, with varying degrees of support from contracted parties and the intellectual property community.

Registries and registrars have cautiously welcomed the notion of a central ICANN gateway for Whois data, because they think it might make ICANN the sole “data controller” under GDPR, reducing their own legal liability.

IP interests of course leap to support any idea that they think will give them access to data GDPR has denied them.

The new group, which is not a formal policy-making body in the usual ICANN framework, was hand-picked by Afilias CTO Ram Mohan, at the request of ICANN CEO Goran Marby.

As it’s a technical group, the IP crowd and other stakeholders don’t get a look-in. It’s geeks all the way down. Eight of the 10 are based in North America, the other two in the UK. All are male. A non-zero quantity of them have beards.

  • Benedict Addis, Registrar Of Last Resort.
  • Gavin Brown, CentralNic.
  • Jorge Cano, NIC Mexico.
  • Steve Crocker, former ICANN chair.
  • Scott Hollenbeck, Verisign.
  • Jody Kolker, GoDaddy.
  • Murray Kucherawy, Facebook.
  • Andy Newton, ARIN.
  • Tomofumi Okubo, DigiCert.

While the group is not open to all-comers, it’s not going to be secretive either. Its mailing list is available for public perusal here, and its archived teleconferences, which are due to happen for an hour every Tuesday, can be found here. The first meeting happened this week.

Unlike regular ICANN work, the new group hopes to get its work wrapped up fairly quickly, perhaps even producing an initial spec at the ICANN 64 meeting in Kobe, Japan, next March.

For ICANN, that’s Ludicrous Speed.

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Comments (2)

  1. John Berryhill says:
    December 19, 2018 at 11:00 am

    That anyone in this reality believed Facebook is an appropriate organization to be represented on a panel to study access to non-public personal information, speaks volumes about the myopia of the ICANN groupthink mindset.
    Facebook has been dishonest with national legislative inquiries, has engaged in anti-semitic conspiracy mongering against its critics, and the extent of Facebook’s abuse of personal data may never fully be known as new revelations concerning their shady practices continue.
    There is no justification for a corrupt organization such as Facebook to be allowed anywhere near a serious effort to balance privacy with legitimate need for access to data. None.

    Reply

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