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Pritz quits Whois privacy group as work enters impossible second phase

Kevin Murphy, February 22, 2019, 19:20:51 (UTC), Domain Policy

Kurt Pritz has quit as chair of the ICANN group working on Whois policy for the GDPR era.
He informed the Whois Expedited Policy Development Process working group in a notice to its mailing list today, saying he was leaving for “a set of personal and professional reasons”.
He said he will stick around until his replacement is selected.
I understand three people had put themselves forward for the role when Pritz was originally selected last July, so there may be a couple of alternates already waiting in the wings.
The announcement comes at a pivotal time for the EPDP, and whoever takes over is going to have to have some seriously masochistic tendencies.
The 30-odd member group just this week put the finishing touches to its “phase one” initial report, which primarily sets out the formal legal purposes for which Whois data is collected and processed across the domain name ecosystem.
That’s going to be voted on by the GNSO Council in a vote delayed from this week to March 4 at the request of the Intellectual Property Constituency and Business Constituency, which want more time to review and comment on it.
For the EPDP WG, it’s soon time to move on to phase two, which will cover the creation (or not) of a unified access mechanism that trademark owners and the like could use to snoop on redacted Whois data.
Even the relatively easy tasks in phase one have been absolute murder on the volunteers and ICANN staff, who have been putting in four or more hours of teleconferences per week since August.
I’ve just been dipping in and out of the mailing list and listening to the odd teleconference, and the level of nitpicking over language has been agonizing to listen to.
Essentially, virtually every debate comes down to a face-off between the IP interests who want to insert as much language concerning access as possible, and those, such as non-commercial users, who oppose them. It sometimes comes across like a proxy war between Facebook and the Internet Governance Project.
More than once, naturally mild-mannered Pritz has had to delegate control to firm-handed mediators drafted in from a specialist outside agency.
Whoever takes over as chair has got his or her work cut out.

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