Protest ICANN's Proposal to Kill WHOIS Privacy
respectourprivacy.com
respectourprivacy.com
However, it feels like the Internet is losing its way. It is impossible to point to what specifically is causing it, but I feel like people have gotten so used to ceding their identities, data, and privacy to massive organizations like Facebook (and those organizations engage in actions like tracking anyway) that culture in general just doesn't care. The Internet used to be and still is a decentralized system which can empower people, but as it continues to get more and more centralized and governments and organizations don't see broad resistance against invasions of privacy, the Internet becomes less and less something that empowers and more like something that can trap people. And that's not even considering the Idiocracy-style apps and games that are getting pumped out on a daily basis that people are literally wasting their lives away on.
I imagine this comes off as a bit snobbish or melodramatic, but the very audience that uses this site are the people creating this future. You can't get too angry at ICANN killing WHOIS privacy if you work for a company that disregards privacy, too.
note: I use all of these services. I just wish there was more I dunno....rage...from the technology creators about whatever it is that we are creating, which we all seem to know isn't okay but we do anyway. It just amazes me that posts like this or documentaries about Aaron Schwartz can coexist on the frontpage with stories about the latest derivative tech company. This is very much an inudstry with two minds.
When it comes to the web, it feels like Google are now doing more to shape things to their business model than anyone else. HTTP/2, WebAssembly... it's only a matter of time before Chrome becomes the Play Store. This is a completely different vision to the days of centralized but federated services like e-mail, newsgroups and IRC. The web still feels like a pool of ugly hacks, but now it's ripe.
When you look outside of the web, there's little innovation on the open Internet. You can probably count the exciting non-proprietary stuff that has touched mainstream in the last 15 years on one hand (BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin). Most of what's 'hot' on the Internet isn't innovative at all, and it's all walled, proprietary, and monopolised (IM, social networking, VoIP)
I think there are projects/people working on the things you are concerned about, but it will take time. I believe people are going to have to have some machine on their wired, home connection that is always-on doing background stuff that a SAAS server would be doing. The software business is closer to native applications in that case.
Huh? That's not a Google-exclusive thing.
That's interesting. I know that some, like .us, do not support this because the managers of .us forbid it. But for .io, some registrars do support privacy protection (including GoDaddy), so I wonder what is keeping it unavailable for Namecheap?
From a strictly "how it impacts me" point of view, I don't suppose I'd be overly pissed off if I cannot keep my domain registrations private. I just recently grabbed af7pl.us [1] for any future ham radio related stuff I might want to put on the net, and so had to put real contact information into WHOIS, so there is not all that much point of keeping the same information out of there for my other domains. When my current other domains are up for renewal I'll probably drop WHOIS privacy on them.
[1] There is nothing there, so don't waste time visiting it unless you want to see Namecheap's default page for new domains that haven't set their DNS to point somewhere else yet.
They shouldn't get rid of this.
The problem was, honestly, in the early days it was mostly early adopters and business users that used the internet. They cared about those things.
Now, its everyone...and the vast majority of people simply don't think critically about how easy it is to for people in power to abuse the system or for others to harass people when they are exposed. :/
Backwards as it might seem, I would like to see more things pop up to help reduce peoples' internet dependence. If you look at all the sketchy legislation alone like the TPP and the Florida law requiring real whois info, things are definitely heading south.
If the Internet were more decentralized, wouldn't there be more 'derivative' companies just due to the fact that there would be many companies competing in the same space (e.g. many companies offering social networking via federated, but decentralized services)?
A very long list of domain registrars have come together on this one:
1 & 1 Internet Blacknight Domain.com DomainIt Domains By Proxy DomainCocoon Inc. Endurance International Group, Inc. eNom EuroDNS GoDaddy IDCPrivacy.com InternetX GmbH Key-Systems, GmbH Moniker Online Services, LLC Moniker Privacy Services, LLC Name.com Namecheap NetEarth One, inc. Perfect Privacy, LLC Tucows Web.com Whoisprivacy.com, Ltd.
Oh speaking of Markmonitor I just send their DMCA emails to spam now (they can send me a proper notice via normal DMCA channel as is required if they so care) since every single one is for a dead pages or false notices, hell they even sent one the other day for a domain not in used in 7 years!
Obviously the usages of WHOIS have drifted over time to go beyond that.
I could however see a strong argument to remove the email field, as any email address will be abused regardless of whom or what will actually read things sent to it.
The petition site says this:
"Under new guidelines proposed by MarkMonitor and others who represent the same industries that backed SOPA, domain holders with sites associated to "commercial activity" will no longer be able to protect their private information with WHOIS protection services."
The linked ICANN working group document says this:
"The WG agrees that the status of a registrant as a commercial organization, non-commercial organization, or individual should not be the driving factor in whether P/P services are available to the registrant. Fundamentally, P/P services should remain available to registrants irrespective of their status as commercial or non-commercial organizations or as individuals."
And this:
“[D]omains used for online financial transactions for commercial purpose should be ineligible for privacy and proxy registrations.”
And this:
"Given the foregoing discussion, the WG does not believe that P/P registrations should be limited to private individuals who use their domains for non-commercial purposes"
Basically this seems like total knee-jerk crap to me and I am surprised the EFF is banging this drum. What am I missing?
Frankly I'm not fantastically bothered if that's the definition. A lot of "traditional" internet rules/guidelines seems to follow the U.S. model of being an unregulated mess.
I don't agree with harassment per se, but direct action is sometimes quite effective.
Uhm...what? When Wikimedia moved all their domains off of GoDaddy to protest GoDaddy's support of SOPA, they moved them to MarkMonitor. A quick WHOIS check shows that MarkMonitor is still the registrar wikipedia.org (I didn't check any other Wikimedia domains). Other SOPA opponents such as Google and Facebook use or have used MarkMonitor services.
Fight for the Future occasionally sensationalizes things to try to get more signups, and tossing in gratuitous references to SOPA is one way to do that. I'm tempted to flag this, but it does link to the actual proposed rules so I'll refrain.
There are many individuals and organizations in the industry of Internet governance who supported SOPA. More and more, the ICANN is writing rules that overwhelmingly favor copyright enforcement and eschew anonymity, such as the recent rule [allowing ICANN to cancel registrations for domains that don't verify their contact details][1]
After SOPA failed, the vested interests that supported it have parted it out and have been steadily chipping away at Internet freedom bit by bit. ICANN's recent rules are one example. Trans-Pacific Partnership's [restrictions on fair use][2] and expansion of copyright law is another. Rather than pass it outright, the lobbying groups that supported SOPA are passing it little by little.
The copyright and government surveillance industries have demanded an end to online privacy, and now it's up to the few remaining people who give a shit to keep the Internet from being completely taken over by malicious influencers.
[1]: https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2014/01/icanns-new-rules-for-do...
[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150328/07314930468/how-t...
Would you mind please addressing the comment 'tzs actually wrote? It seems like an important point, worth clarifying.
I know this is worried about public knowledge but we don't really have privacy, as far as I know, due to the privileged status of domain registrars.
There are some differences from registry to registry, but the .com/.net registries don't even store contact information at the registry level -- WHOIS is the only source of contact information.
How realistic is having an alternative DNS root?
As for the URI model i don't think that's going to change much, unless there will be a complete abstraction which is something that companies like Google are heavily pushing for, there are some merits for it, but you will also relinquish allot of the control you have today.
I don't like HTTP/2 or WebAssembly for that reason much either, having a non-ASII protocol and a browser that eats up only bytecode means i lose allot of control over the content I'm getting served. Tho the advantages of it on a technical level might be enough to shove all those concerns to the same drawer i keep my tin foil hat in.
I've seen multiple cases of activities raging from purely illegal activities like phishing to simple griefing, and normally you can't do shit about it.
You can have phishing domains which are registered trough even basic privacy shields operating with impunity and you can't do anything about it.
The police doesn't care, the privacy protection is structured in such a manner that you need to get a court order in like 3 different jurisdictions which is impossible even if you are a decent size business unless you have a lot of money not to mention a small business or an individual.
If they are also running something nasty on that domain you might be lucky and you can get their hosting company to cooperate the site will go down but taking control over the domain name it self is nearly impossible.
Edit: Here is an actual case from personal exprience
UK Company with a mycompany.com domain with 1-1.5M GBP a year in revenue and they can't get the mycompany.co.uk domain which is used for spam and phishing taken off.
The co.uk domain is used for some annoying stuff and was registered by "socialshop" and technically ENOM/Rightside but the NS servers and the actual domain registration is handled by privacyprotect.org.
This whole thing was structured in such way that for anyone to talk to you you had to file criminal and civil suits in Hong Kong, Australia, UK/EU and maybe the US to deal with Rightside.
This isn't something that even most SMB's could handle unless it's a huge drain on their business since this ordeal will probably cost more than a yearly revenue for most small and medium businesses.
Luckily they hosted in France of all places and the hosting companies shutdown the website without asking for anythig as soon as the abuse notice was sent.
It seemed like this was just a run of the mill automated phishing/spam campaign so once the website was taken down all traffic from that domain stopped, but they can revive it at any given time.
The whole deal was a bit odd and sad, ENOM did the domain registration and then transferred all the control over the domain to the privacy service which was used to register the domain in the 1st place. Heck they can't even take it off since they can't touch the name servers of that domain since they don't run it. The privacy service won't speak to you and will send you on a legal wild-goose chase around the globe.
This isn't even a privacy/WHOIS issue honestly, the whole registration system is designed to be abused because it's profitable that way.
The "respectyourprivacy" site raises the terrible fear that web site operators might get spam. Big deal. You have spam filters, right? Or that a business might have to have a telephone number that reaches someone. Any business which doesn't, you probably don't want to deal with anyway.
I'm annoyed with the EFF for supporting this. They seem to want to make the Internet a safe space for scumbags. Look who else is supporting this - Namecheap, a bulk domain company. Who needs domains in bulk? Only scumbags, with their spam and made-for-Adsense sites. Namecheap is worried that the junk domain business might collapse. That would be a good thing.
I've had my real address and phone number on all my domains for two decades. That info is also on my trademarks, patents, and D/B/A names. It's just not a problem if you're not a scumbag.
[1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&gr... [2] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
If you want to avoid harassment for voicing your opinion online (see: gamergate), WHOIS privacy is quite useful.
EDIT: If legal action is necessary, why wouldn't a subpoena to the registrar be sufficient?
If ICANN had a policy that registrars must verify the contact information is valid, I could understand that- but this isn't what that is, is it?
Aside from being an ad hominem attack, this isn't even an accurate assessment. Namecheap's domain reseller services are generally used by companies that want to sell domains (e.g, web hosts), but who don't want to go through the expensive, complicated process of becoming accredited as a registrar themselves. Painting them as "supporting scumbags" simply because they resell domains is ridiculous.
To make a comparison here, an analogous statement might be: "Twilio, an automated phone call company. Who needs automated phone calls? Only telemarketers..."
(That's an older site of mine; my main site today is "sitetruth.com". I also have "aetherltd.com" as a hobby site. I'm "nagle" on all those sites, and email works.)
Enom, the bulk domain registrar, does that; they have Enom, Enom2, Enom3, ... Enom1035.[1] That's because when a domain drops, the registrar which can pick it up first rotates through the list of registrars. Having lots of "registrars" gives them a big fraction of dropped domains.
[1] https://www.icann.org/registrar-reports/accreditation-qualif...
You can find out who's behind a corporation
In any case, I thought whois privacy services were real addresses which could have mail/legal proceedings directed to them. I'm surprised to learn that they are all phony addresses. Thanks for teaching me something.
Many jurisdictions allow you to query this information online as well as other significant information about any type of registered organization, not just corporations. I know for instance this is the case in Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, etc.
1) Except it doesn't just apply to businesses.
2) A number of politically oriented sites accept donations [which ICANN/others could consider "commercial" activity] but are espousing views they don't want to be made public [to avoid harassment/retaliation].
etc.
There are plenty of edge cases where this covers things that are "not businesses".