Donuts confirms six-figure .news buyer used a fake name

Mike Texas is in fact noted conspiracy theorist Mike Adams.
New gTLD registry Donuts confirmed with DI over the weekend that the buyer of six figures worth of “platinum” .news domain names used a fake name.
The company last week said that a company called WebSeed bought registry-reserved names including science.news, climate.news, medicine.news, health.news and pollution.news.
After a small amount of digging, I discovered that these sites were affiliated with a controversial site called Natural News, which is regularly criticized for spreading bogus, anti-science content.
I suspected that “Mike Texas”, the WebSeed CEO quoted railing against “fake news” in Donuts’ press release, was very probably a pseudonym for Natural News owner Mike Adams, who calls himself the “Health Ranger” but peddles theories often characterized as dangerous.
Yesterday, Donuts told us that, following DI’s coverage, it has managed to confirm with Texas that he is in fact Adams. The company has changed its press release accordingly.
I will note that the most compelling piece of evidence connecting Texas to Adams was a pre-GDPR Whois record.

Donuts makes six-figure .news sale to dangerous conspiracy theorist

Donuts has sold a package of “platinum” .news domains to a network of dubious news sites peddling what many describe as dangerous pseudo-scientific nonsense.
A company called WebSeed acquired science.news, food.news, health.news, medicine.news, pollution.news, cancer.news and climate.news from the registry for an undisclosed sum in the six-figure range last December, Donuts said.
It appears that the same buyer has acquired several other presumably non-platinum .news domains, including vaccines.news, nutrients.news, menshealth.news and emergencymedicine.news
The sites have already been developed, incorporating a back catalog of “news” content from other sites under the same ownership, and Donuts reckons searches for “climate news” and “science news” already return the matching domains prominently (they don’t for me, but Google can be fickle).
Unfortunately, the domains seem to have been sold to a leading purveyor of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
That’s right, climate.news now belongs to a climate change denier, vaccines.news belongs to an anti-vaxxer, and medicine.news belongs to somebody who values alternative remedies over science-based medicine.
As far as I can tell, pretty much all of the content on the network of .news domains comes from Natural News, the controversial site owned by “Health Ranger” Mike Adams.
Natural News has been fingered as an “empire of misinformation” and a leading contributor to the “fake news” crisis that has been blighting society for the last few years.
Check out climate.news today to be treated to Adams’ theory that climate change is nothing but a conspiracy peddled by the UN and the mainstream media.
Over on vaccines.news, you’ll find a scaremongering story about how the measles vaccine has killed more people than measles over the last decade.
(Gee, I wonder why measles isn’t killing anyone any more? Could it be that we have a fucking vaccine?).
On medicine.news, Adams himself writes of “PROOF that vaccines target blacks for depopulation”.
And at pollution.news, you’ll find any number of articles discussing the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not scientifically literate enough to debunk most of the content on these sites, but I know quackery when I see it.
Donuts’ press release goes to suspicious pains to point out that the sites’ content is “thoroughly researched” and advertising is “limited and relevant to the sites’ content”.
In fact, the advertising seems in most if not all cases to lead back to Adams’ own stores, where he sells stuff like water purifiers, dietary supplements and alternative medicines.
The Donuts press release also quotes the founder and CEO of WebSeed, one “Mike Texas”.
Now, I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Mr Texas is not a real person.
But.
Whois records (remember those?) show that the original registrant of science.news was one Mike Adams of WebSeed LLC, and WebSeed.com, while under privacy for some years, was originally registered to Adams’ Taiwan-based company.
It goes without saying that Donuts, as a neutral registry, is under no obligation whatsoever to police content on the domains it sells. That would be a Bad Thing.
But I can’t help but feel that .news has the potential to take a big credibility hit due to the content of these sites.
Imagine a fox, buying up all the good .henhouse domains. It’s a bit like that.

Could crypto solve the Whois crisis?

Could there be a cryptographic solution to some of the problems caused by GDPR’s impact on public Whois databases? Security experts think so.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group has proposed that hashing personal information and publishing it could help security researchers carry on using Whois to finger abusive domain names.
In a letter to ICANN, APWG recently said that such a system would allow registries and registrars to keep their customers’ data private, but would still enable researchers to identify names registered in bulk by spammers and the like.
“Redacting all registration records which were formerly publicly available has unintended and undesirable consequences to the very citizens and residents that electronic privacy legislation intends to protect,” the letter (pdf) says.
Under the proposed system, each registry or registrar would generate a private key for itself. For each Whois field containing private data, the data would be added to the key and hashed using a standard algorithm such as SHA-512.
For items such as physical addresses, all the address-related fields would be concatenated, with the key, before hashing the combined value.
The resulting hash — a long string of gibberish characters — would then be published in the public Whois instead of the [REDACTED] notice mandated by current ICANN policy.
Security researchers would then be able to identify domains belonging to the same purported registrant by searching for domains containing the same hash values.
It’s not a perfect solution. Because each registry or registrar would have their own key, the same registrant would have different hash values in different TLDs, so it would not be possible to search across TLDs.
But that may not be a huge problem, given that bad guys tend to bulk-register names in TLDs that have special offers on.
The hashing system may also be beneficial to interest groups such as trademark owners and law enforcement, which also look for registration patterns when tracking down abuse registrants.
The proposal would create implementation headaches for registries and registrars — which would actually have to build the crypto into their systems — and compliance challenges for ICANN.
The paper notes that ICANN would have to monitor its contracted parties — not all of which may necessarily be unfriendly to spammers — to make sure they’re hashing the data correctly.

Euro-Whois advice still as clear as mud

European privacy chiefs have again weighed in to the ongoing debate about GDPR and Whois, offering another thin batch of vague advice to ICANN.
The European Data Protection Board, in its latest missive (pdf), fails to provide much of the granular “clarity” ICANN has been looking for, in my view.
It does offer a few pieces of specific guidance, but it seems to me that the general gist of the letter from EDPB chair Andrea Jelinek to ICANN CEO Goran Marby is basically: “You’re on your own buddy.”
If the question ICANN asked was “How can we comply with GDPR?” the answer, again, appears to be generally: “By complying with GDPR.”
To make matters worse, Jelinek signs off with a note implying that the EDPB now thinks that it has given ICANN all the advice it needs to run off and create a GDPR-compliant accreditation system for legitimate access to private Whois data.
The EDPB is the body that replaced the Article 29 Working Party after GDPR came into effect in May. It’s made up of the data protection authorities of all the EU member states.
On the accreditation discussion — which aims to give the likes of trademark owners and security researchers access to Whois data — the clearest piece of advice in the letter is arguably:

the personal data processed in the context of WHOIS can be made available to third parties who have a legitimate interest in having access to the data, provided that appropriate safeguards are in place to ensure that the disclosure is proportionate and limited to that which is necessary and the other requirements of GDPR are met, including the provision of clear information to data subjects.

That’s a fairly straightforward statement that ICANN is fine to go ahead with the creation of an accreditation model for third parties, just as long as it’s quite tightly regulated.
But like so much of its advice, it contains an unhelpful nested reference to GDPR compliance.
The letter goes on to say that logging Whois queries should be part of these controls, but that care should be taken not to tip off registrants being investigated by law enforcement.
But it makes no effort to answer Marby’s questions (pdf) about who these legit third-parties might be and how ICANN might go about identifying them, which is probably the most important outstanding issue right now.
Jelinek also addresses ICANN’s lawsuit against Tucows’ German subsidiary EPAG, and I have to disagree with interpretations of its position published elsewhere.
The Register’s Kieren McCarthy, my Chuckle Brother from another Chuckle Mother, reckons the EDPB has torpedoed the lawsuit by “stating clearly that it cannot force people to provide additional ‘admin’ and ‘technical’ contacts for a given domain name”.
Under my reading, what it actually states is that registrants should be able to either use their own contact data, or anonymized contact information identifying a third party, in these records.
The EDPB clearly anticipates that admin and technical contacts can continue to exist, as long as they contain non-personal contact information such as “admin@example.com”, rather than “kevin@example.com”.
That’s considerably more in line with ICANN’s position than that of Tucows, which wants to stop collecting that data altogether.
One area where EDPB does in fact shoot down ICANN’s new Whois policy is when it comes to data retention.
The current ICANN contracts make registrars retain data for two years, but the EDPB notes that ICANN does not explain why or where that number comes from (I hear it was “pulled out of somebody’s ass”).
The EDPB says that ICANN needs to “re-evaluate the proposed data retention period of two years and to explicitly justify and document why it is necessary”.
Finally, the EDPB weighs in on the issue of Whois records for “legal persons” (as opposed to “natural persons”). It turns out their Whois records are not immune to GDPR either.
If a company lists John Smith and john.smith@example.com in its Whois records, that’s personal data on Mr Smith and therefore falls under GDPR, the letter says.
That should provide a strong incentive for registries and registrars to stop publishing potentially personal fields, if they’re still doing so.

Fight breaks out as Afilias eats Neustar’s Aussie baby

The transition of .au to Afilias’ registry platform over the weekend seems to have gone quite smoothly, but that hasn’t stopped Neustar and a former key executive from lashing back at what it says are the gaining company’s “misinformed” statements.
The war of words, which has got quite nasty, came as Afilias transferred all 3.1 million .au domains to its control, after 16 years with the former incumbent.
Neustar, which hadn’t said much about losing one of its most-lucrative TLD contracts, on Friday published a lengthy blog post in which it said it wanted to “set the record straight” about Afilias’ statements leading up to the switch.
Afilias, in a series of blog posts and press releases since it won the .au contract, has been bigging up its technical capabilities.
While it’s not directly criticized Neustar and predecessor AusRegistry (which Neustar acquired for $87 million), the implication of many of these statements is that Neustar was, by comparison, a bit shit.
In Neustar’s latest post, Aussie VP George Pongas takes issue with several of these claims.
Any implications that the company did not offer 24/7 registrar support were incorrect, he wrote. Likewise, the idea that it did not have a DNS node in Western Australia was not true, he wrote.
He also took issue with claims that Afilias would offer improved security and a broader feature set for registrars, writing:

We’ve raised a number of concerns directly with auDA about what we considered to be inaccurate remarks comparing Neustar’s systems with the new Registry and implying that the new Registry will include “all previous functionality plus enhanced security and authentication measures”, as stated in recent auDA Member communications. We questioned auDA about this and were informed that the statement is comparing the various testing phases of Afilias’ Registry – so the latest version has “all previous functionality” of the earlier versions. It doesn’t mean the Registry will have “all previous functionality” of Neustar’s platform – which we believe the statement implies. It is a fact that a number of the proprietary features and services that Neustar currently provides to Registrars will no longer be available under the new Registry system, and thus Registrars will likely notice a difference.

“We stand by our statements,” an Afilias spokesperson told DI today.
While Neustar’s corporate stance was fairly reserved, former AusRegistry boss Adrian Kinderis, never a shrinking violet, has been reacting in an almost presidential fashion, using Twitter to describe auDA CEO Cameron Boardman as “incompetent”, criticizing a reporter, and using the hashtag #crookedcameron.

#crookedcameron actually asked me to come work for @auda so I would be silent on all the bullshit he is peddling thinking I could be #paidoff. Happy to tell you all I gave him a polite #gofuckyourself does the @auda Board know he offered me the gig?

— Adrian Kinderis (@AdrianKinderis) July 1, 2018

Kinderis, who headed up AusRegistry for the whole of its 16-year run with .au, left Neustar in April, three years after the acquisition. He’s now running something called MadBarry Enterprises and is still associated with the new gTLD .film.
He reckons Neustar lost the .au contract purely for financial reasons.
While Neustar is believed to have lowered its registry fee expectations when pitching to continue as the back end, auDA will save itself about AUD 9 million a year ($7 million) under Afilias, compared to the old regime.
auDA is not expected to hand this saving on to registrars and registrants, though I hear registrars have been offered marketing rebates recently.
auDA has previously told us that Afilias scored highest on the technical evaluation of the nine bidders, and that it was not the bidder with the lowest fee.
Kinderis is also of the opinion that Afilias is among those helping auDA stack its membership with compliant stooges.
Last month, auDA announced a dramatic four-fold increase in its membership — getting 955 new membership applications in just a month.
auDA thanked Afilias for this growth in membership, alongside three of the largest .au registrars: Ventra IP, Arq Group (formerly Melbourne IT), and CrazyDomains owner Dreamscape Networks.
An Afilias spokesperson said that the company had offered its staff the option to become auDA members and about half — I estimate at roughly 150 people based on Afilias’ previously published headcounts — had taken it up on the offer.
It sounds rather like Afilias footed the AUD 22 per-person “Demand-class” membership application fees.
The rapid increase in membership at auDA has raised eyebrows in the .au community, with some accusing the registry of “branch stacking”.
That’s an Australian term used to describe the practice of signing up large numbers of members of a local branch of a political party in order to swing important votes.
The 955-plus new members will not be approved in time to influence the outcome of the vote to oust the auDA chair and others later this month.
But they will have voting rights by the time auDA’s annual general meeting comes around later this year. The AGM is when auDA will attempt to reform itself in light of a harsh government review of its practices.
As for the migration to Afilias itself, it seems to have gone relatively smoothly. I’m not aware of any reports of any serious technical issues, despite the fact that it was the largest TLD migration ever.
Some members have pointed out that most of .au’s ops are now off-shore, and old auDA Whois service is now hosted on a .ltd domain (hey, somebody’s got to use it) which is itself protected by Whois privacy.
I also noticed that the auDA web site, which used to have a hook into the registry that published an updated domain count every day, is no longer working.

How ICANN thinks YOU could get full Whois access

With blanket public Whois access now firmly a thing of the past due to GDPR, ICANN has set the ball rolling on an accreditation system that would reopen the data doors to certain select parties.
The org yesterday published a high-level framework document for a “Unified Access Model” that could give Whois access to approved users such as police, lawyers, and even common registrants.
It contains many elements that are sure to be controversial, such as paying fees for Whois access, the right of governments to decide who gets approved, and ICANN’s right to see every single Whois query carried out under the program.
It’s basically ICANN’s attempt to frame the conversation about Whois access, outlining what it expects from community members such as registries and registrars, governments and others.
It outlines a future in which multiple “Authenticating Bodies” would hand out credentials (either directly or via referral to a central authority) to parties they deem eligible for full Whois access.
These Authenticating Bodies could include entities such as WIPO or the Trademark Clearinghouse for trademark lawyers and Interpol or Europol for law enforcement agencies.
Once suitably credentialed, Whois users would either get unexpurgated Whois access or access to only fields appropriate to their stated purpose. That’s one of many questions still open for discussion.
There could be fees levied at various stages of the process, but ICANN says there should be a study of the financial implications of the model before a decision is made.
Whois users would have to agree to a code of conduct specific to their role (cop, lawyer, registrant, etc) that would limit how they could use the data they acquire.
Additionally, registrars and registries would have to log every single Whois query and hand those logs over to ICANN for compliance and audit purposes. ICANN said:

based on initial discussions with members of the Article 29 Working Party, ICANN proposes that registry operators and registrars would be required to maintain audit logs of domain name queries for non-public WHOIS data, unless logging a particular entry is contrary to a relevant court order. The logs would be available to ICANN org for audit/compliance purposes, relevant data protection authorities, the registrant, or pursuant to a court order.

On the higher-level question of who should be given the keys to the new gates Whois — it’s calling them “Eligible User Groups” — ICANN wants to outsource the difficult decisions to either governments or, as a backstop, the ICANN community.
The proposal says: “Eligible User Groups might include intellectual property rights holders, law enforcement authorities, operational security researchers, and individual registrants.”
It wants the European Economic Area members of its Governmental Advisory Committee, and then the GAC as a whole, to “identify or facilitate identification of broad categories” of eligible groups.
ICANN’s next public meeting, ICANN 62, kicks off in Panama at the weekend, so the GAC’s next formal communique, which could address this issue, is about a week away.
ICANN also wants the GAC to help it identify potential Authenticating Bodies that would hand out credentials.
But the GAC, in its most recent communique, has already declined such a role, saying in March that it “does not envision an operational role in designing and implementing the proposed accreditation programs”.
If it sticks with that position, ICANN says it will turn to the community to have this difficult conversation.
It notes specifically the informal working group that is currently developing a “community” Accreditation & Access Model For Non-Public WHOIS Data.
This group is fairly controversial as it is perceived by some, fairly I think, as being dominated by intellectual property interests.
The group’s draft model is already in version 1.6 (pdf), and at 47 pages is much more detailed than ICANN’s proposal, but its low-traffic mailing list has almost no contracted parties on board and the IP guys are very decidedly holding the pen.
There’s also a separate draft, the Palage Differentiated Registrant Data Access Model (or “Philly Special”) (Word doc), written by consultant Michael Palage, which has received even less public discussion.
ICANN’s proposal alludes to these drafts, but it does not formally endorse either as some had feared. It does, however, provide a table (pdf) comparing its own model to the other two.
What do not get a mention are the access models already being implemented by individual registrars.
Notably, Tucows is ready to launch TieredAccess.com, a portal for would-be Whois users to obtain credentials to view Tucows-managed Whois records.
This system grants varying levels of access to “law enforcement, commercial litigation interests, and security researchers”, with law enforcement given the highest level of access, Tucows explained in a blog post yesterday.
That policy is based on the GDPR principle of “data minimization”, which is the key reason it’s currently embroiled in an ICANN lawsuit (unrelated to accreditation) in Germany.
Anyway, now that ICANN has published its own starting point proposal, it is now expected that the community will start to discuss the draft in a more formal ICANN setting. There are several sessions devoted to GDPR and Whois in Panama.
ICANN also expects to take the proposal to the European Data Protection Board, the EU committee of data protection authorities that replaced the Article 29 Working Party when GDPR kicked in last month.
However, in order for any of this to become binding on registries and registrars it will have to be baked into their contracts, which will mean it going through the regular ICANN policy development process, and it’s still not clear how much enthusiasm there is for that step happening soon.

In GDPR case, ICANN ready to fight Tucows to the bitter end

ICANN has appealed its recent court defeat as it attempts to force a Tucows subsidiary to carry on collecting full Whois data from customers.
The org said yesterday that it is taking its lawsuit against Germany-based EPAG to a higher court and has asked it to bounce the case up to the European Court of Justice, as the first test case of the new General Data Protection Regulation.
In its appeal, an English translation (pdf) of which has been published, ICANN argues that the Higher Regional Court of Cologne must provide an interpretation of GDPR in order to rule on its request for an injunction.
And if it does, ICANN says, then it is obliged by the GDPR itself to refer that question to the ECJ, Europe’s highest judicial authority.
The case concerns Tucows’ refusal to carry on collecting contact information about the administrative and technical contacts for each domain name it sells, which it is contractually obliged to do under ICANN’s Whois policy.
These are the Admin-C and Tech-C fields that complement the registrant’s own contact information, which Tucows is of course still collecting.
Tucows says that these extra fields are unnecessary, and that GDPR demands it minimize the amount of data it collects to only that which it strictly needs to execute the registration contact.
It also argues that, if the Admin-C and Tech-C are third parties, it has no business collecting any data on them at all.
According to Tucows legal filings, more than half of its 10 million domains have identical data for all three contacts, and in more than three quarters of cases the registrant and Admin-C are identical.
In its appeal, ICANN argues that the data is “crucial for the objectives of a secure domain name system, including but not limited to the legitimate purposes of consumer protection,
investigation of cybercrime, DNS abuse and intellectual property protection and law enforcement needs”.
ICANN uses Tucows’ own numbers against it, pointing out that if Tucow has 7.5 million domains with shared registrant and Admin-C data, it therefore has 2.5 million domains where the Admin-C is a different person or entity, proving the utility of these records.
It says that registrars must continue to collect the disputed data, at the very least if it has secured consent from the third parties named.
ICANN says that nothing in the Whois policy requires personal data to be collected on “natural persons” — Admin-C and Tech-C could quite easily be legal persons — therefore there is no direct clash with GDPR, which only covers natural persons.
Its appeal, in translation, reads: “the GDPR is irrelevant if no data about natural persons are collected. In this respect, the Defendant is contractually obliged to collect such data, and failure to do so violates its contract with the Applicant.”
It goes on to argue that even if the registrant chooses to provide natural-person data, that’s still perfectly fine as a “legitimate purpose” under GDPR.
ICANN was handed a blow last month after a Bonn-based court refused to give it an injunction obliging EPAG (and, by inference, all registrars) to continue collecting Admin-C and Tech-C.
The lower court had said that registrants would be able to continue to voluntarily provide Admin-C and Tech-C, but ICANN’s appeal points out that this is not true as EPAG is no longer requesting or collecting this data.
In ICANN’s estimation, the lower court declined to comment on the GDPR implications of its decision.
It says the appeals court, referred to in translation as the “Senate”, cannot avoid interpreting GDPR if it has any hope of ruling on the injunction request.
Given the lack of GDPR case law — the regulation has only been in effect for a few weeks — ICANN reckons the German court is obliged by GDPR itself to kick the can up to the ECJ.
It says: “If the Senate is therefore convinced that the outcome of this procedure depends on the interpretation of certain provisions of the GDPR, the Senate must refer these possible questions to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling”.
It adds that should a referral happen it should happen under the ECJ’s “expedited” procedures.
An ECJ ruling has been in ICANN’s sights for some time; late last year CEO Goran Marby was pointing out that a decision from the EU’s top court would probably be the only way full legal clarity on GDPR’s intersection with Whois could be obtained.
It should be pointed out of course that this case is limited to the data collection issue.
The far, far trickier issue of when this data should be released to people who believe they have a legitimate purpose to see it — think: trademark guys — isn’t even up for discussion in the courts.
It will be, of course. Give it time.
All of ICANN’s legal filings, in the original German and unofficial translation, can be found here.

Atallah encourages domainers to get involved in ICANN

ICANN Global Domains Division chief Akram Atallah today encouraged domain investors to participate more in the ICANN community.
“Domain investors’ voices need to be heard in ICANN,” he said during brief remarks opening NamesCon Europe here in Valencia this morning.
“Your voices are as important as everyone else’s and should be heard,” he said.
He noted to the largely European crowd here that ICANN has a public meeting coming up in Barcelona toward the end of the year.
The call came within the context of comments that focused almost exclusively on GDPR and Whois.
Atallah said that the absence of Whois would make it difficult to track down bad guys and harder for the average person to ensure that the information they get online comes from a reputable source.
“Not everything on the internet is true,” he said, to an faux-incredulous “WHAT?!?” from a member of the audience. “You need to know who is behind this information.”
He said that ICANN hopes to keep Whois as transparent as possible, and played up the fact that most community members are now in agreement that a tiered access system seems like the best way forward, which he called a “major shift from 12 months ago, when the community could not agree on anything”.
He added that now that the Article 29 Working Party has been replaced by the European Data Protection Board, it could help ICANN figure out how to proceed on GDPR compliance efforts.
“I think we’ll get more clarity,” he said.
Disclosure: I’m at NamesCon on my own dime, but with a complementary complemintary complimentary press pass.

US asks if it should take back control over ICANN

The US government has asked the public whether it should reverse its 2016 action to relinquish oversight of the domain name system root.
“Should the IANA Stewardship Transition be unwound? If yes, why and how? If not, why not?”
That’s the surprisingly direct question posed, among many others, in a notice of inquiry (pdf) issued yesterday by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The inquiry “is seeking comments and recommendations from all interested stakeholders on its international internet policy priorities for 2018 and beyond”. The deadline for comments is July 2.
The IANA transition, which happened in September 2016, saw the NTIA remove itself from the minor part it played, alongside meatier roles for ICANN and Verisign, in the old triumvirate of DNS root overseers.
At the handover, ICANN baked many of its previous promises to the US government into its bylaws instead, and handed oversight of itself over to the so-called Empowered Community, made up of internet stakeholders of all stripes.
The fact that the question is being asked at all would have been surprising not too long ago, but new NTIA chief David Redl and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross expressed their willingness to look into a reversal as recently as January.
Back then Redl told Congresspeople, in response to questions raised primarily by Senator Ted Cruz during his confirmation process:

I am not aware of any specific proposals to reverse the IANA transition, but I am interested in exploring ways to achieve this goal. To that end, if I am confirmed I will recommend to Secretary Ross that we begin the process by convening a panel of experts to investigate options for unwinding the transition.

Cruz had objected to the transition largely based on his stated (albeit mistaken or disingenuous) belief that it gave China, Iran and a plethora of bad guys control over Americans’ freedom of speech, something that has manifestly failed to materialize.
But in the meantime another big issue has arisen — GDPR, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation — which is in the process of eroding access rights to Whois data, beloved of US law enforcement and intellectual property interests.
NTIA is known to be strongly in favor of retaining access to this data to the greatest extent possible.
The notice of inquiry does not mention Whois or GDPR directly but it does ask several arguably related questions:

A. What are the challenges to the free flow of information online?
B. Which foreign laws and policies restrict the free flow of information online? What is the impact on U.S. companies and users in general?
C. Have courts in other countries issued internet-related judgments that apply national laws to the global internet? What have been the practical effects on U.S. companies of such judgements? What have the effects been on users?

NTIA’s statement announcing the inquiry prominently says that the agency is “working on” items such as “protecting the availability of WHOIS information”.
It also says it “has been a strong advocate for the multistakeholder approach to Internet governance and policy development”.
While GPDR and Whois are plainly high-priority concerns for NTIA, it’s beyond my ken how reversing the IANA transition would help at all.
GDPR is not ICANN policy, after all. It’s a European Union law that applies to all companies doing business in Europe.
Even if the US were to fully nationalize ICANN tomorrow and rewrite Whois policy to mandate the death penalty for any contracted party that refused to openly publish full Whois records, that would not make GDPR go away, it would probably just kick off a privacy trade war or mean that all US contracted parties would have to stop doing business in Europe.
That sounds like an extreme scenario, but Trump.
The NTIA’s inquiry closes July 2, so if you think the transition was a terrible idea or a wonderful idea, this is where to comment.

Court denies ICANN’s GDPR injunction against Tucows

A German court has refused ICANN’s request for a GDPR-related injunction against Tucows’ local subsidiary EPAG, throwing a key prong of ICANN’s new Whois policy into chaos.
EPAG now appears to be free to stop collecting contact information for each domain’s administrative and technical contacts — the standard Admin-C and Tech-C fields.
The ruling may even leave the door open for registrars to delete this data from their existing Whois databases, a huge blow to ICANN’s Whois compliance strategy.
According to an ICANN-provided English translation of the ruling (pdf), the Bonn judges (whose names are redacted — another win for GDPR?) decided that the Admin-C and Tech-C records are unnecessary, because they can be (and usually are) the same person as the registrant.
The judges said that if the additional contact names were needed, it would have historically been a condition of registration that three separate people’s data was required.
They wrote that this “is proof that any data beyond the domain holder — different from him — was not previously necessary”.
“Against the background of the principle of data minimization, the Chamber is unable to see why further data sets are needed in addition to the main person responsible,” they wrote.
Data minimization is a core principle of GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in the EU less than a week ago. Tucows and ICANN have different interpretations on how it should be implemented.
The judges said that the registrant’s contact information should be sufficient for any criminal or security-related investigations, which had been one of ICANN’s key claims.
They also said that ICANN’s attempt to compare Whois to public trademark databases was irrelevant, as no international treaties govern Whois.
If the ruling stands, it means registries and registrar in at least Germany could no longer have to collect Admin-C and Tech-C contacts.
Tucows had also planned to delete this data for its existing EPAG registrations, but had put its plan on hold ahead of the judge’s ruling.
The ruling also gives added weight to the part of ICANN’s registry and registrar agreements that require contracted parties to abide by local laws.
That’s at the expense of the new Temporary Policy governing Whois introduced two weeks ago, which still requires Admin-C and Tech-C data collection.
There was no word in ICANN’s statement on the ruling last night as to the possibility of appealing.
But the org seized on the fact that the ruling does not directly state that EPAG would be breaching GDPR rules by collecting the data. General counsel John Jeffrey is quoted as saying:

While ICANN appreciates the prompt attention the Court paid to this matter, the Court’s ruling today did not provide the clarity that ICANN was seeking when it initiated the injunction proceedings. ICANN is continuing to pursue the ongoing discussions with the European Commission, and WP29 [the Article 29 Working Party], to gain further clarification of the GDPR as it relates to the integrity of WHOIS services.

Tucows has yet to issue a statement on the decision.
It may not be the last time ICANN resorts to the courts in order to seek clarity on matters related to GDPR and its new Temporary Policy.