[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] ICANN Status Quo vs ccTLDs / local laws etc.,

[Michele Neylon - Blacknight]

Very much in my personal capacity .. 

I’ve been reading a lot of the back and forth around some aspects of whois on the list. While I could reply to an existing thread I don’t want to as my comments aren’t directed at anybody specifically nor would I want them to be construed as a response to anyone’s specific concerns.

Domain names are a lot more than just .com or .$newTLD. There are over 200 country code domain names that have existed for many years. 

The way that they all handle whois should not be overlooked and in fact we should, in my personal opinion,  be engaging with ccTLD managers to get a better understanding of how  and why they arrived at the particular whois policies that they currently have. 

Outside the US .com is not the only show in town. (Sorry Chuck ( )

In many countries either the local ccTLD dominates the market or has close parity with .com and other gTLDs.

When it comes to privacy concerns and legal issues most ccTLDs in Europe at least have had to deal with this already, which is why two things tend to happen:
1 – Public whois data is limited to a degree both in terms of which data is published and how it is accessed (the amount varies by ccTLD)
2 – LEA (and other legitimate actors) have other means of accessing the non-public data.

Just because ICANN has never dealt with the concerns raised on multiple occasions by privacy advocates, data protection authorities, registrants, registrars and registries does not mean that the current status quo is legal in many jurisdictions.

Personally I am a domain name registrant as well as a registrar. I have registered domain names for my own usage in many of the European ccTLDs and in most cases the amount of my personal data that is made available to the public is very limited.

A couple of examples to illustrate my point:
A .ie (Ireland)
http://paste.ie/view/a13e73bb

A .eu registered to an organisation:
http://paste.ie/view/be25f0c9

(You can get an email address and physical address for the registrant from the web based whois, but it’s an image not plain text and is protected by a captcha ie. Scraping the whois for personal details is hard work.)

A .org.uk opted out of whois:
http://paste.ie/view/9239add8

Regards

Michele

--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
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