Posts by Ross Rader

Most people would jump on the opportunity to spend 10 days in Los Angeles. Sun, surf and stars – it doesn’t get any better.

Of course, most people aren’t involved in ICANN. 10 days with no sunlight and all of our surfing was done on the web.

A typical ICANN meeting starts out with the pre-meeting activity. This time, I flew down a couple of days ahead of the pre-meetings for some pre-pre-meetings to make sure that the pre-meetings went smoothly. Confused yet? Me too and I’ve been doing this for eight years.

The big item on the agenda this past week was the issue of Whois. The problem that we face is that ICANN’s requirement to publish personal contact information on the web via Whois contradicts privacy laws in many countries. We’ve been actively involved in trying to find a compromise between the anti-privacy crowd who wants to continue with Whois in its current form regardless of what the law says and the pro-privacy folks on the other hand that are looking for exemptions that would allow regular people to opt-out of having their data publicly accessible. Not all of their data, just their phone number and email addresses.

The anti-privacy folks (mostly the same people that brought you the RIAA and other over-zealous intellectual property organizations) don’t like this approach because they believe that this will make it easier for normal folks to infringe on their intellectual property rights. I won’t go into the details of their arguments, but suffice to say that there is very little in the way of “intellect” in their opposition.

I personally spent four days in various back-room meetings trying to negotiate a compromise that would work for everyone. At one point, I had an explicit agreement from the intellectual property representatives, but when the chips hit the table, they “forgot” that we had made a deal. Serves me right, I should have had them sign something. Never do a handshake deal with a lawyer from Hollywood.

I won’t go into all of the gory details around Whois, there are a bazillion press reports on the subject. Dvorak called me “stupid”, elsewhere I was referred to as “emotional” and that I was “overreacting”. Very few of the reports actually got the details of the story right – most of them were heavily influenced by the highly-organized lobby against our compromises. Never underestimate the capabilities of a ticked off intellectual property lawyer.

Nick Jesdanun and Burke Hansen wrote my two favorite stories, although what Burke thought was an attempt at a protest was actually an aborted attempt to sneak out to the washroom.

The next big issues on the ICANN policy agenda relate to domain tasting and “front-running”. There will also be some additional work in the area of domain transfers. We will continue to take a leadership role on these issues as we have on other ICANN issues in the past. It is an important organization that makes important decisions related to the future of the internet and we believe it is critical for us to make sure that we look out for the interests of our business and those of our resellers in this forum.

This meeting also marked the end of Vint Cerf’s term as Chairman of the Board. At a gala event at Sony Studios, everyone from Al Gore to Darth Vader participated in sending Vint off in style with the kind of words and more than just a touch of Hollywood flourish.

Vint will be replaced with Peter Dengate-Thrush, a long time ICANN participant with roots in the ccTLD community. Tucows completely supports Peter and we strongly believe that he will have a positive effect on ICANN and its future direction. It is definitely worth noting that Peter was one of the few ICANN directors that voted against allowing Verisign the unchecked capability to increase domain name registration prices.

The next ICANN meeting will be held in New Delhi this coming February. Tucows will of course be there – our 28th consecutive meeting. Whew!

(photo’s by AP and Joi Ito)

As this article illustrates, there is a lot of interest brewing around ICANN’s proposed Whois privacy policies. I suspect that a lot of this interest is due to the fact that the intellectual property community can see the end of their free ride and they are really turning up their efforts in a last ditch attempt to overturn ICANN’s progress.

For as long as the Whois system has been around, they’ve been able to look up your personal contact data and churn out demand letters and other nasty legal notices on demand. The problem with this behavior is that the system was designed to support this type of activity, nor should this type of activity be continued at the expense of the privacy rights of the majority of internet users. The intellectual property lobby pays *nothing* for the ongoing support or maintenance of this sytem, yet they put incredible demands on it. I have actually asked them who should pay for change to the Whois system necessary to support their demands and they’ve said point blank that the most equitable way would be to tax all domain registrations!

I spoke with Nick Jesdanun of Associated Press yesterday about the whois policy recommendations that were recently put forward, and he’s written a typically great article about the general issues surrounding whois and whois data privacy.

Many owners of Internet addresses face this quandary: Provide your real contact information when you register a domain name and subject yourself to junk or harassment. Or enter fake data and risk losing it outright.

Help may be on the way as a key task force last week endorsed a proposal that would give more privacy options to small businesses, individuals with personal Web sites and other domain name owners.

– Nick Jesdanun, Associated Press

I would have liked to have seen the article include a slight bit mroe detail around some of the reactions coming from outside of North America. Hollywood’s lobby is pretty strong on this side of the pond, but that hasn’t stopped heavyweights like the European Union from weighing in on the issue on the side of privacy [PDF].

After years of debate, ICANN is moving towards adopting policy recommendations that will reform the gTLD whois system and allow registrants a greater degree of privacy, certainty of ownership and control over their internet identity.

Law.com has a decent write up on the whois issue, albeit with a decidedly pro-intellectual property slant.

An organization that polices the domain name system is likely to decide this year — after several years of debate — to adopt a new policy that would let Web site owners keep most of their contact information confidential when they register for a name. Instead, they would be allowed to list a separate go-between point of contact.

The basic issue at stake is whether or not intellectual property lawyers should continue to have unfettered access to your customer data or not. The usual suspects – the RIAA, MPAA and curiously, internet heavyweights like Microsoft and Yahoo! say yes, definitely. Naturally, Tucows came out on the side of the customer and held the line to ensure that basic personal privacy rights are respected as far as domain registration data goes.

The upcoming ICANN meeting in Lisbon will certainly see more discussion on these issues, but the recent closure of the Whois Task Force is a great step in the right direction.

Tucows has been at the forefront of this issue since the beginning, we'll definitely keep you informed as it progresses.

Mark Jeftovic of EasyDNS makes some great points about the CIRA Board of Directors election currently underway. CIRA is the organization responsible for running the registry and managing the policy for the dotCA ccTLD.

During my 3-year tenure on the CIRA Board, I got the opportunity to travel across the country. Whenever we held a public forum anywhere in Canada, the turnout was usually quite high and the participants informed and enthusiastic.

Then near the end of every open forum I made it a habit to ask the attendees the following question: “How many people here voted in the last election?” and the silence was usually deafening. Less than 10 hands would go up every time, guaranteed.

So why the disconnect between getting live bodies out to an actual event and getting stakeholders to click a few buttons through their web browser?

– via Mark Jeftovic

Historically, a very small number of people were responsible for casting the votes for the candidates that get elected to the CIRA Board – less than 1000 votes were necessary to get elected in past elections. This really needs to change – the bar should be much higher, which means more members need to get involved.

I'm actually a candidate in this election and if you are a CIRA member, I'd really appreciate it if a) you would get involved in this election, and b) support my candidacy by casting a vote in my favor.

I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this blog post into a shameless self-promotion, so if you are interested in my “platform”, you can read more here, here and here. If you have any questions about how to cast a vote or about specific issues raised by my platform, please be sure to drop me a line!