[At-Large] [lac-discuss-en] GigaOM article : Louis Vuitton asks for SOPA-like seizure of hundreds of websites

[Evan Leibovitch]

On 14 May 2012 17:18, John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> (I do, however, believe that the whois is a privacy disaster
>
> The anonymity for criminals with vanity domains argument is so 20th
> century.


In my own opinion, the argument about providing privacy to domain owners
*must* be decoupled from the matter of WHOIS accuracy and stability. The
unwillingness to decouple these issues has been an impediment to sane
policy, and I see this report as a step in the right direction.

There are discussions over tactics that could be done to enhance privacy
protections for those who are not using it to defraud, but those
discussions are IMO unrelated to the more common-sense matter of
registrants providing deliberately obfuscated contact information.

(Ultimately, I would wish to dig even deeper than this, and challenge the
widely-held-within-ICANN assumption that everyone on earth ought to own at
least one domain. This unspoken assumption drives everything from WHOIS
policy, to attitudes on domaining and the new gTLD program, to ICANN's
warped definition of "consumer". IMO this assumption needs to be exposed,
confronted, and beaten down with a stick.)

- Evan