The European Commission (EC) has finally weighed in on the recommendations of ICANN's Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP). The EPDP is reforming WHOIS to make it consistent with GDPR and privacy rights. The EC comments, we are happy to report, are well aligned with the positions of privacy advocates. This...
March 4 was a landmark day in the history of Whois. The final report of ICANN’s Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP), setting out a new, more or less privacy-compliant Whois policy, was approved by the GNSO Council, ICANN’s policy development organ for domain names. The policy recommendations in that report,...
The ICANN policy process for bringing Whois into compliance with privacy law has just about reached the end of its first phase (we will report more on that when it releases the final report). The next phase will focus on what is sometimes called "access" but is more accurately described...
Facebook did not have a good 2018. Treating its customers' personal information as a commodity, it was revealed by New York Times that “For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners...
On the day before the American Thanksgiving holiday, ICANN released the initial report of the policy development process that is trying to reform Whois. Jokes about turkeys were probably inevitable, but to the EPDP members who have spent months of practically non-stop work on it (including two IGP partners), that sign of progress was something to...
ICANN's expedited policy development process (EPDP) to make Whois compatible with GDPR is making progress, albeit very slowly. Another round of face to face meetings will be held at ICANN 63 in Barcelona, Spain beginning Saturday October 20. But some participants in the group are becoming uneasy about ICANN CEO...
IGP held a session at the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and Public Interest with Stephen Ezell of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), Peter Swire of Georgia Tech, and Charles Duan and Bill Watson from R Street. The Internet and Trade track of this conference was organized by...
Ever since ICANN’s creation, there has been a clash between the protection of personal data and its contractually-required Whois service. Under ICANN contracts, registrars were required to publish sensitive information about domain name registrants. The email addresses, names and other contact information of domain holders was available to anyone in...
ICANN* has a problem. One could even call it a disease - an organizational version of Sydenham’s chorea. What are the symptoms? This: ICANN has in place elaborate, well-defined, and reasonably balanced representational mechanisms for making policies. But every time it has an important decision to make, ICANN tries to...
Now that Whois has been changed to become compliant with the GDPR, the battleground over Whois and privacy has shifted to the question of how people can get past the restrictions and gain access to all the personal information about domain name registrants that used to be there. This process...
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