[At-Large] the usual fantasy whois arguments

[John R. Levine]

>> Moreover the right to speech is found in many similar Constitutioal
>> statements of rights around the world, which is something that one can
>> not say about militias and infringement on bearing arms.

Oh, right, this inane argument.

You know, when ICANN revisits WHOIS yet again, some of us are going to 
describe actual serious harm done by people with domains with bogus whois. 
Last year I testified in two court cases where crooks used large numbers 
of faked domains to enable a multi million dollar fake drug and 
nutriceutical scheme, and a separate pump and dump stock fraud scheme. 
While it is certainly important to protect individuals' private 
information, the vast majority of domains are registered by organizations, 
and the majority of those for purposes ranging from sleazy to felonious. 
So the sensible way to protect the handful of individual vanity 
registrants, while also protecting the vastly larger number of 
non-registrants who are attacked by crooks, is to treat individual 
registrants as exceptions.

Then some At-Large factions are going to wave their hands about 
nonexistent harm to hypothetical people, with the ever popular freedom 
fighter who somehow critically needs a proxy domain registration despite 
having arranged for mail and web hosting and internet access without the 
benefit of one.

This is a waste of time.

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