[At-Large] Private v. Public.

[Evan Leibovitch]

Agreed with about everything Bill said.

> A domain name is not a requirement to speak anonymously on the internet.

This is the fatally flawed assumption in most privacy arguments, including
Karl's.

ICANN long ago made the policy decision that Internet domains are property,
not identity. As such they can (and should) be treated with the same
requirements of ownership disclosure as other forms of intellectual
property, which by and large are publicly searchable. Functionally (if not
technically), WHOIS shouldn't have disclosure policies much different from
TESS <http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=4005:890zev.1.1>.

Such a mechanism may lead one to proxies, but those proxies must themselves
provide accurate information that can ultimately, as required, ultimately
give a trusted path back to the source.

Personally, I like the middle ground of CIRA, the Canadian ccTLD that has
different disclosure policies for individials and organizations. It allows
individual registrants to hide criticlal parts of WHOIS for casual lookups,
but does not offer that facility to organizations. In doing so, it still
demands accurate WHOIS data.

- Evan