[AusNOG] ICANN to bring an end to TLD privacy?

[Mark ZZZ Smith]

While I understand the desire for privacy, I'm not sure it is as much of an issue in this case as people might think it is.
I've had a number of domain names registered to me with this email address, my mobile number and my PO BOX(es) since 2002.
I do receive quite a lot of spam to this email address, but then again I've been using it quite publicly for many years, including on a number of public mailing lists and in open source code that also gets published on web pages. So I can't attribute spam I've received specifically to my domains' whois information.
I haven't had any issues with having my mobile number listed, and I've had the same mobile number since 1995. On very rare occasions I've received SMS spam, however I couldn't attribute that to my whois details. Neither have I had any issues listing my PO BOX - I can only think of a few pieces of mail I've received over the years that I definitely could attribute to being sent because of my whois information. I would recommend a PO BOX to hide where you actually live though, if you're going to publish your mailing address publicly (as I have done in a number of Internet Drafts).
It is my understanding that the existing "privacy" service that registrars offer is achieved by them actually registering the domain name in their name, and then letting you use it i.e., it isn't actually your domain name, it is theirs. I think I read a while ago about a dispute between a customer and a registrar, where the registrar was in the wrong, but they wouldn't let the customer have the domain and the customer couldn't get the domain because it wasn't actually registered in their name. 
Regards,Mark.
      From: Brad Peczka <brad at bradpeczka.com>
 To: "ausnog at lists.ausnog.net" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net> 
 Sent: Thursday, 25 June 2015, 15:39
 Subject: [AusNOG] ICANN to bring an end to TLD privacy?
   
At the behest of organisations such as MarkMonitor, ICANN is considering a policy change whereby domain holders with sites associated to "commercial activity" will no longer be able to protect their private information with WHOIS protection services. 

The text of the proposal can be found on ICANN's website at https://gnso.icann.org/en/issues/raa/ppsai-initial-05may15-en.pdf

Something worth noting is that the definition of 'Commercial Activity' appears to be quite wide, and will likely encompass a number of sole/small traders who operate under their own name, rather than a business. I personally feel that the auDA approach hits the happy medium - protecting a large amount of information from being publicly accessible, while still being able to see what entity is in control of a domain name.

If you're interested in commenting, the close date for submissions is 7th July... so get typing!

Regards,
-Brad.
_______________________________________________
AusNOG mailing list
AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog


  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20150625/cc5b3774/attachment.html>