Hacker News Reader

Comment by robalfonso | Hacker News Reader

In the short term WHOIS is going to be limited to just the registrant organization, state, country and a masked email address (Admin and Technical fields will be removed save email). This is short term to come into compliance with GDPR.

Long term ICANN intends to create a privileged group (other registrars, law enforcement, etc) Who will be able to get to the full whois data. So a sort of tiered system. Expect this to take a minimum of a year. The ICANN multi stake holder model means nothing happens fast.

View on HN

> Long term ICANN intends to create a privileged group (other registrars, law enforcement, etc) Who will be able to get to the full whois data.

To a substantial degree it's privacy for the powerful and transparency for the weak. It should be the reverse: The powerful and government institutions should be transparent, and citizens should have their privacy.

> The powerful and government institutions should be transparent, and citizens should have their privacy.

Hear, hear! The most frustrating part of the Clinton email fiasco to me was the contrast between the rule bending going on at the highest levels in the name of privacy, and the pervasive monitoring that the rest of us are subjected to.

> Long term ICANN intends to create a privileged group (other registrars, law enforcement, etc)

And trademark owners, of course. So that the Three Letter Corporation (TLC) can continue sending lawyers to wrestle away control over the domain of Theodore L. Clark's personal homepage initially set up in 1995 (and enthusiastically maintained since).

Because chaos and mayhem would result if there's even a single ccTLD where the "tlc" label is not assigned to the same one entity that just redirects it to their .com anyway.

This is exactly why privacy and proxy services will still be necessary - it will essentially re-balance what GDPR has unbalanced (no judgement on whether that is favorable or not)

Just another way ICANN can make money. You can bet your bottom they will sell the premium access.

> Expect this to take a minimum of a year.

GDPR was announced over 2 years ago, why are they only just starting now?

They aren't but the nature of the process is "Everyone gets an opinion" that takes a lot of time. So they spent over a year soliciting opinions, sorting out legal issues etc, and came up with "we need some kind of authorization system on top of whois" but they've got to build it and they have 0 competence in that realm, so it will need to be put back out to committee. A process will have to be devised, a spec written, spec adopted etc. Its a huge slow bureaucracy. 2 years is fine to expect a business to be compliant with something, for a pseudo governmental organization its not nearly enough time.

That simply not true. The EU data protection Working Party (Article 29 aka. WP29) has being telling them since 2003 that Whois is not compatible with EU law [0]. That's well over a decade.

Even if ICANN only took GDPR seriously, their plan A was awful and their plan B was non-existent, see the thread further up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081950

[0] http://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com