[At-Large] 9th Circuit Court ruling on ICANN Contract.

[John R. Levine]

>> Oh no. You are inserting a right here where there is none. The right to
>> privacy regarding the ownership of a domain name. Anonymous speech does
>> not equate to anonymous domain name registration.
>
> That makes no sense - people have a Federal Constitutional right to
> privacy - See Griswold v Connecticut.

Of course they do, but it is an absurd leap to conclude that this somehow 
gives people a right to register domains anonymously.

It is entirely possible for people to use the Internet without one's own 
vanity domain, as evidenced by the fact that about 99.9% of Internet users 
have never registered a domain and never will.  A look at the venomous 
screeds found in any web site's comment section will confirm that the lack 
of a vanity domain is no bar to anonymous speech.

>> The registration of a domain requires the owner of the domain to correctly
>> identify oneself to the public when registering the domain  name.
>
> "requires" - sez who?  A non-responsive answer would be "a
> self-proclaimed regulator such as ICANN".  Self-proclaimation hardly
> constitutes a legitimate form of "requires".

If you want to register in ICANN's TLDs, you have to play by ICANN's 
rules.  If you prefer some other TLDs, or some other DNS root, you know 
where to find them.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly