[NA-Discuss] who does the ALAC represent, was WHOIS study group

[John Levine]

> Oversimply stated, we are interested in seeing a compromise that would 
> allow a consumer to use accurate WHOIS data to help determine the 
> credibility of a Web site with which the consumer is about to do 
> business, while not compromising, say, the right of Burmese citizens to 
> create Web sites to describe the conditions within their country without 
> fear of being tracked down and harmed by their government via WHOIS 
> data.

This is basically CAUCE's position, too.  And I agree with Wendy's point 
that it's essentially a political issue.

If the ALAC represents small scale registrants, then a totally anonymous 
WHOIS is ideal, since it would relieve us of much of the tedious need to 
deal with the consequences of what we do with our domains.  But if the 
ALAC represents Internet users, a large fraction, probably the majority, 
of domains with which we have contact are of unknown reliability and the 
more we know, the better choices we can make, and good WHOIS info is an 
important tool.

The arguments about personal privacy and Burmese freedom fighters have 
never impressed me, not because I don't think they're important, but 
because removing info from WHOIS a lousy way to address them, and because 
of chronic confusion between pseudonymous and anonymous speech.  For 
individual privacy, the thin privacy proxies offered by Tucows and other 
registrars seem about right, enough to keep spammers and nosy neighbors 
away.

For the Burmese freedom fighters, the whole issue of WHOIS is silly. By 
itself a domain is useless -- for your domain to be useful you need web 
hosting, mail, DNS, and so forth, all of which have to be provided by 
someone who either knows who you are and you trust not to rat you out, or 
has some sort of one-way drop so you can contact them even though they 
can't find you.  Whatever it is, if it's good enough to set up DNS and a 
web site, it's good enough to buy a domain, too.

So as it stands, I can't say I'm particularly upset by yet more delay, 
because at this point I haven't seen any WHOIS proposal that wouldn't be 
uniformly worse than what we have now, obfuscating info from people with a 
reasonable need for it, not making the "real" info behind the obfuscation 
any more reliable than it is now, and not providing any better security 
for the few people who really need their info to be private.

R's,
John