[At-Large] [Fwd: [gnso-whois-wg] Draft outcomes report v 1.6]

[Vittorio Bertola]

Wendy Seltzer ha scritto:
> Please share your comments on version 1.6 of the WHOIS WG report. I've
> already shared my (personal) disagreement with most of the statements of
> claimed "agreement," and with the way disagreement has been
> characterized.  Others who'd like to agree or disagree should please do so.
> 
> I have not said the OPOC should have no responsibilities,
> rather that those responsibilities should be determined between the
> registrant and its OPOC, not imposed by ICANN, since the registrant
> remains responsible for registration and use of the domain name.

I have been quite active on the Whois WG mailing list for the last 
several weeks.

I find the report unfairly and purposely biased in favour of the 
position of the intellectual property constituencies. The numerous 
objections to many of the items that the Chairman stated as "agreed" in 
the draft report were ignored, or dismissed as individual views - there 
never were consensus calls, but it was the objecting people's task to 
demonstrate that there was no consensus on something that the Chairman 
had unilaterally considered agreed.

I think that, apart from the details of the specific proposals, this 
entire process is almost a farce and only demonstrates the GNSO's 
inability to properly consider the public interest and what's good for 
the Internet as a whole. Specifically, there is a clear attempt to use 
this working group to prove that privacy laws (and, in general, laws 
from countries other than the US) do not apply to the Internet, and that 
IP lawyers have a right to get private details about whoever runs a 
domain name and use them whenever they unilaterally feel that some 
client's intellectual rights have been hampered, without any kind of 
impartial check in the middle. This is very different from granting law 
enforcement agencies prompt access to such information whenever they 
need it, which is what is sorely needed to protect the Internet from 
phishing etc., and which will only become more difficult as a 
consequence of this approach.

I have stated my objections to certain specific proposals of the report 
- many of which, by the way, would constitute criminal offences in 
Europe and in the other parts of the world that have privacy laws - and 
as I have seen no desire to consider them, I don't think that we should 
lose more time on this work. We should simply state what is evident, 
i.e. that the GNSO, under the present constituency system, is unable to 
achieve a proper balance of the various interests and harmonize them in 
the overall interest of the Internet as a whole, and so whatever will 
come out of this process will be flawed.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------