No Such Weblog

ICANN has finally posted Paul Twomey's letter to the GNSO regarding new registry services. Key quote: I hereby make a formal request to the GNSO Council that it commence a GNSO Policy Development Process designed to produce recommendations to the Board for a timely, transparent and predictable process for dealing with proposed future new "services" or significant actions by TLD registries that, because of their architecture or operation, could impact the operational stability, reliability, security or global interoperability of the DNS, that registry, or the Internet.

A draft for that letter was read and discussed at the GNSO Council's telephone conference on 16 October, which resulted in the formal initiation of the policy development process requested by Twomey. What follows are the notes I took during that telephone conference.

The GNSO's WHOIS Steering Committee's work product has now been forwarded to the GNSO Council: Terms of Reference for three task forces, on Restricting access to WHOIS data for marketing purposes, Data collection and display, Accuracy. I don't think any of the groups involved with the steering committee is entirely happy with these terms of reference, but that may just be a sign for a good compromise.

What's more worrisome is that the commercial user constituencies have recently started campaigning against the general approach, and for a single task force that would address the top 5 issues that started off the steering committee's work. Such a task force would basically have no chance to make any progress on WHOIS privacy at all.