ICANN seeking input on ceding control of WHOIS privacy to governments [pdf]

ICANN seeking input on ceding control of WHOIS privacy to governments [pdf](icann.org)

66 points by hnyk 8 years ago | 25 comments

AndyMcConachie 8 years ago |

Clickbait title. This is out for community review, nothing is final yet.

https://www.icann.org/news/blog/data-protection-privacy-upda...

hnyk 8 years ago | |

Well, time will tell what happens after the review but we all know what ICANN has done in the past!

hnyk 8 years ago | | |

Changed it. I guess now it's better!

f055 8 years ago |

This sounds like the whois privacy that we all know and have to pay for, will be mandatory to implement on all domains everywhere, becoming free?

icebraining 8 years ago | |

That's the impression I got from reading the EFF report on it; the GDPR makes WHOIS essentially impossible.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/europes-gdpr-will-forc...

zaarn 8 years ago |

This is amazing.

Finally I can stop all that "SIGN UP YOUR WEBSITE FOR <SERVICE>" spam incoming from my whois entries.

bharrison 8 years ago | |

Think so?

"The public WHOIS would include an anonymized email address or a web form from which messages could be forwarded to the registrant email address."

zaarn 8 years ago | | |

That's far better than the current system.

Atm I have to expose my email domain, which means some spammers just fire a broadside of this crap.

When it comes from an anonymized email forwarder, I can easily just redirect it into the spam folder.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8 years ago | | |

So that would mean that I could not control rotation of that address anymore? That sounds bad ...

tankenmate 8 years ago | | |

That's fine, you just route to /dev/null everything that goes to the anonymised address; the email headers either won't be re-written or will be re-written a la RFC 5321. Either way you'll be able to easily identify emails sent to the anon email address and dump them on the floor.

thathappened 8 years ago |

Anyone else think things like this, dns, ssl authority, and lots more a better areas to focus blockchain tech toward?

exelius 8 years ago | |

Everyone ignores that in order for a blockchain to work, there needs to be a governance model that weeds out bad actors. In finance markets, this is somewhat ok because the governance model of laissez-faire economics (a common mental model to apply to finance) is simply “buy at your own risk”. That governance model won’t work for something like DNS — if control of a DNS name is maliciously reassigned, there would need to be some agreement around how that gets done and who has the authority to do that.

Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized authority model that Bitcoin has, it’s going to be a tiered trust authority in the same way that SSL roots work today. You’re going to end up with very similar governance models and the same organizations, just implemented in blockchain.

I think some of the important impacts of blockchain are yet to be recognized: I do think it will force us to fundamentally think about what consensus and rule of law means in any given scenario, and that will have some pretty outsized social impacts — especially in the way we run organizations.

We will have to be far more deliberate about how we design our governance models, but I worry they will become so complex as to grow beyond the possibility of oversight...

mr_spothawk 8 years ago | | |

> Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized authority model that Bitcoin has, it’s going to be a tiered trust authority in the same way that SSL roots work today.

it's going to be very difficult to code for:

"we, as a network, accept this authority... to a degree"

I still think it can be done.

mr_spothawk 8 years ago | | |

cough block chain for value is here cough

cough block chain for contracts is almost here cough

cough blockchain for governance is next cough