Comments on: ICANN’s assault on personal and small business privacy

By: jdw

jdw — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 16:26:22 +0000

In reply to Anita. Sadly, based on ICANN's history, once the comment period closes they lose all interest in what the public has to say. It's almost like accepting public comment at all is just an empty pro-forma gesture. I hope that's not the case, but we should hear more about this within the next couple of months. -jdw

By: Anita

Anita — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 13:55:49 +0000

I’m so sorry to have missed the deadline for online survey submissions to ICANN but will email them direct anyway because this is a huge global problem impacting so many people. Any idea when we’ll hear more about this issue?

By: james

james — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 04:43:07 +0000

I have a psycopath out there that attacked my family long ago, and swore to kill me. So I am incredibly against allowing my personal information to be easily accessible. If they are insisting on it, they also should insist on paying the damages that are incurred (including loss of life and property damage) as a result of these types of policies. and regarding the ‘need’ for a whois database. A good sysadmin will have the server notify him via email/pager/ text if there are any issues, anyone that might need to notify them would have their contact info. As someone else mentioned, these databases are used entirely by spammers and thugs.

By: jdw

jdw — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 19:58:55 +0000

In reply to Steve. The deadline for responses was July 7th. -jdw

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 19:57:23 +0000

The survey link to Survey Monkey says: “This survey is currently closed. Please contact the author of this survey for further assistance.”

By: Daran

Daran — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 01:42:42 +0000

Maybe time to prioritise this proposed feature?

https://members.nearlyfreespeech.net/support/voting?issue=33055#prop33055

By: Nick Levinson

Nick Levinson — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:32:13 +0000

This may need political organizing to push ICANN, although the issue is probably too obscure for a Congressional committee.

On the Supreme Court supporting anonymity, see https://www.congress.gov/constitution-annotated/ and open the 1st Amendment PDF to pp. 1346-47; it’s about paper material but for the Internet see p. 1333; and consider all the cases as forming one body of law.

By: Nick Levinson

Nick Levinson — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 01:59:32 +0000

International protection is vital for critics under repressive antidemocratic regimes. Granted that nations already have plenty of power with which to uncover contact information, it shouldn’t be made even easier.

Some privacy/proxy services will seek to mobilize their customers but some probably won’t and, worse, not everyone who receives a call to action is in any position to respond without giving away their identity.

I emailed ICANN.

By: Judy

Judy — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 00:45:28 +0000

TDW - You commented earlier that the only alternatives might be ccTLD's run by national governments. This is going to be a *huge* issue for so many of us. Any thoughts on which ones might pose the fewest issues regarding domain privacy? Thanks much for any suggestions you can provide. We're not big fans of any ccTLD, so we're not the best people to ask about this. As far as I can tell, every single one of them has its own unique crippling problem. -jdw

By: Finn

Finn — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 01:06:49 +0000

Notes for other folks filling out the ICANN form:

It goes point-by-point through the specific recommendations. Don’t just blindly say “no” to everything; some of them (“p/p services must disclose their terms clearly”) are perfectly reasonable.

Questions you’re likely to care about include: 13 (affiliation with registrars), 14 (empowerment of the point of contact), 16 (dealing with lists of proposed conduct–this is okay if you want ICANN to have their fingers in it at all, but I took the comment space to say otherwise), 18-20 (what to relay), and 22 (details of disclosure framework. The really big one is 23, mandatory disclosure. There’s also a general “more comments” field at the end.

It’s helpful to have the working group report open in another tab, even if you’re not going to read the whole thing. When they cite specific documents, they link them.

Final thought on finishing: ICANN uses generic web-based survey-makers? Seriously?!

Thanks for looking out for us, NFSN. 🙂

Great analysis of their form! -jdw