It seems like too long documents are fashionable these days.
It's not just three days worth of broadcast treaty negotiations that have been minuted by a group of daring bloggers and NGO participants in the recent Geneva negotiations. (Donna Wentworth: required reading.)
For the ICANN addict, there are also three WHOIS Task Force reports totaling 202 pages of text, a Draft Procedure For Designating Subsequent .net Operator, and a modest six-page GNSO draft for criteria to be used in selecting that operator; all these documents are waiting for public comment some time in June.
WHOIS Task Force 3 was supposed to deal with measures for improving WHOIS data accuracy. The result of this group's work is a report that was published against the recommendations of the three entities representing the parties most affected in this process: On the supply side, the registrars constituency (minority report here); on the registrant side, NCUC and ALAC opposed the report. The biggest problem with this report is that it failed to take key input from parties affected into account -- this is illustrated by the fact that the report comes with a minority statement from those who are supposed to implement it, the registrars' constituency. That's something that just shouldn't happen. The report's recommendations are also often unclear, nonsensical, or even known to be harmful from discussions on the DNSO's WHOIS Task Force in 2002/2003. Overall, this report needs considerable reconstruction work on its way to a "final report."
Task Forces 1 & 2 dealt with access to WHOIS data and with data elements collected and displayed. Both Task Forces ended up having discussion that were in the other task force's description of work. Both discussed tiered access models where some data elements are available in a public tier, while other data elements are only available to "privileged" parties. ALAC's proposal here is to define the privileged tier as "anyone who reliably identifies themselves and their purpose", and to make identity and purpose available to the registrant when a privileged tier query is done. Commercial user constituencies in particular opposed the last part of this proposal. There are also "white list" proposals floating around that seem to suggest that the privileged tier could be based on a white list of IP addresses that continue to get the traditional level of WHOIS data access.
While the reports are up for public comment, the groups are supposed to bring their recommendations together. For that end, a conference call had been scheduled for Wednesday, but was then deferred until next week because this document hadn't been finished by ICANN staff. A point-by-point comparison of the policy proposals on the table and of the ways in which they overlap or even contradict each other would actually have been worth waiting for, and could indeed be valuable for policy work. Let's hope that something like that surfaces during the next couple of days.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to point out how thes recent task forces demonstrate the problems with the reformed GNSO PDP.
