ICANN's GNSO Council stumbled and bumbled its way to a nonresolution of the Whois privacy controversy today (Wednesday, All Hallows Eve). On the surface, nothing changed. Despite ICANN's inertia, however, the “status quo” Whois is gradually being eroded by a combination of market forces, which allow registrants to buy a modicum of privacy protection from registrars, and the ongoing threat of legal assaults on Whois from outside the United States. A growing number of ccTLDs and gTLDs can be expected to force ICANN to adjust its Whois requirements to the data protection laws of other countries, the most current example being the TELNIC case. This means that the status quo equilibrium left in place by ICANN's inability to act is tilting slowly in favor of privacy. At the same time, law enforcement and takedown measures are taking new directions, pioneered by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, that also work outside the ICANN process.
.uk Registry: DNSSEC Needs “Enhanced Cooperation”
As ICANN opened its in Los Angeles on Monday, the .uk registry released a short position paper on DNSSEC — and focused on the issue of signing the root zone. Intentionally or not, Nominet's paper validates IGP's long-held contention that there are major public policy issues around DNSSEC. In it they highlight the need for a single trust anchor and warn against alternative solutions. They emphasize the need for the keys to be managed by ICANN/IANA and used by the root zone maintainer to sign the root, and, most importantly, the necessity of opening up root management through “enhanced cooperation.”
ICANN as Fake Institution: WHOIS, Privacy and Credible Commitment
Q: When is a policy adopted unanimously in ICANN not really a consensus policy?
A: When the US Government says it isn't.
Case in point. A new top level domain registry, TELNIC, has been authorized to run the .tel domain. Their idea is that .tel will allow and encourage individuals and corporations to manage a universal identity on the Internet. If its idea works, lots of ordinary people will register under the .tel domain and combine their telephone numbers, email addresses, and other identifiers. The company is based in the UK.
TELNIC has a problem: ICANN's contracts require it to display all the personal contact data of its registrants through a service known as “Whois.” But unrestricted access to personal contact data, aside from being a rather bad idea, is against the law in the UK. It follows European, not American, privacy and data protection rules. So after consulting with the UK's data protection authorities, TELNIC asked ICANN to modify its Whois requirement. But the US government, responding to trademark and copyright interests, won't let it, and is manipulating ICANN to get its way.
IGF Rio to be Supported by Online Community
As most of you know, the Inaugural Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
in Athens spawned a number of "Dynamic Coalitions.” These multisakeholder Dynamic Coaliations (DCs) were designed to include all interested parties from both developed and developing countries, and to advance the work of the Forum. One of these DCs, the Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition (OCDC), has developed a suite of collaboration
tools to facilitate a degree of online participation at the upcoming
Internet Governance Forum in Rio.
Have a CERTs
This week I attended the GovCert.NL Symposium in the Netherlands. This is the 6th annual gathering of “Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and other experts in Internet security and privacy. About 50% of the participants were Dutch, I would guess, and maybe 85% from Europe, although there were attendees from as far away as the USA, Japan and Australia. There were some fascinating presentations, including an analysis of the role of money mules in phishing scams, analysis of a new “man in the middle”-style attack on banks, attempts by governments to implement digital identity systems, a detailed recounting of the Estonian “cyber riot” that temporarily crippled the Internet in that country, advocacy for Bitfrost, a new operating system platform based on new privacy/security assumptions, and, oh, a very interesting discussion of the Whois-privacy problem in ICANN. 😉
Net Non-Neutrality Trade Threat? China Blocks RSS Feeds
IGP noted early on how progressive companies like eBay were viewing the content blocking and filtering aspects of the net neutrality debates as having broader economic impacts. Now it seems Silicon Valley is picking up on this emerging issue.
OECD: Mobilizing Civil Society for the Internet Ministerial
A series of meetings in Ottawa, Canada this week started setting the foundation for civil society participation in the Seoul Ministerial on The Future of the Internet Economy. IGP is involved in this initiative, along with APC and EPIC's Public Voice, as part of the reference group coordinating civil society participation. There were 3 meetings of interest: an initial exploratory gathering of civil society Forum participants on Wednesday October 3rd; official OECD intergovernmental meetings on Thursday October 4th; and a liaison betwen nonstate actors and the South Korean government officials responsible for organizing the logistical aspects of the Seoul meeting.
