
ICANN seeking input on ceding control of WHOIS privacy to governments [pdf] - hnyk
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/proposed-interim-model-gdpr-compliance-summary-description-28feb18-en.pdf
======
AndyMcConachie
Clickbait title. This is out for community review, nothing is final yet.

[https://www.icann.org/news/blog/data-protection-privacy-
upda...](https://www.icann.org/news/blog/data-protection-privacy-update-
seeking-input-on-proposed-interim-model-for-gdpr-compliance)

~~~
hnyk
Well, time will tell what happens after the review but we all know what ICANN
has done in the past!

~~~
hnyk
Changed it. I guess now it's better!

------
f055
This sounds like the whois privacy that we all know and have to pay for, will
be mandatory to implement on all domains everywhere, becoming free?

~~~
icebraining
That's the impression I got from reading the EFF report on it; the GDPR makes
WHOIS essentially impossible.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/europes-gdpr-will-
forc...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/europes-gdpr-will-force-icann-
improve-whois-privacy)

------
zaarn
This is amazing.

Finally I can stop all that "SIGN UP YOUR WEBSITE FOR <SERVICE>" spam incoming
from my whois entries.

~~~
bharrison
Think so?

"The public WHOIS would include an anonymized email address or a web form from
which messages could be forwarded to the registrant email address."

~~~
zaarn
That's far better than the current system.

Atm I have to expose my email domain, which means some spammers just fire a
broadside of this crap.

When it comes from an anonymized email forwarder, I can easily just redirect
it into the spam folder.

~~~
Larrikin
What purpose does the Whois email serve if most people want to directly send
it to their spam box? Seems like they should just scrap it.

~~~
msrpotus
What if there’s something illegal, violating copyright, etc. on the site? Or
to take a less legal example, what if someone’s site is hacked? You need some
way of getting in touch with the owners.

~~~
logfromblammo
The snail-mail address of the registered agent would suffice. The cost of
postage is sufficient to deter the least-determined spammers. And the most-
determined spammers would be deterred by the most potentially profitable
targets having legal departments handling the mail received by their
registered agents.

------
thathappened
Anyone else think things like this, dns, ssl authority, and lots more a better
areas to focus blockchain tech toward?

~~~
exelius
Everyone ignores that in order for a blockchain to work, there needs to be a
governance model that weeds out bad actors. In finance markets, this is
somewhat ok because the governance model of laissez-faire economics (a common
mental model to apply to finance) is simply “buy at your own risk”. That
governance model won’t work for something like DNS — if control of a DNS name
is maliciously reassigned, there would need to be some agreement around how
that gets done and who has the authority to do that.

Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized
authority model that Bitcoin has, it’s going to be a tiered trust authority in
the same way that SSL roots work today. You’re going to end up with very
similar governance models and the same organizations, just implemented in
blockchain.

I think some of the important impacts of blockchain are yet to be recognized:
I do think it will force us to fundamentally think about what consensus and
rule of law means in any given scenario, and that will have some pretty
outsized social impacts — especially in the way we run organizations.

We will have to be _far_ more deliberate about how we design our governance
models, but I worry they will become so complex as to grow beyond the
possibility of oversight...

~~~
mr_spothawk
> Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized
> authority model that Bitcoin has, it’s going to be a tiered trust authority
> in the same way that SSL roots work today.

it's going to be very difficult to code for:

"we, as a network, accept this authority... to a degree"

I still think it can be done.

