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posted by chromas on Saturday April 21 2018, @05:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the IWONT dept.

The US government has waded into the omni-shambles that is the internet infrastructure industry's failed effort to comply with European privacy laws.

Having tried to use its behind-the-scenes influence at a recent meeting of DNS overseer ICANN to drive decisions, the Department of Commerce's frustration had led to it going public with a letter to ICANN [PDF] in which it pressures the organization to investigate the world's largest registrar GoDaddy for limiting access to its "Whois" service.

In preparation for the May 25 deadline of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and in light of the utter failure of ICANN to come up with a way to make the Whois service compliant with that law, GoDaddy has started hiding personal contact details for the 50 million+ domain names it looks after and has begun throttling access to its Whois service.

That would appear to be a commonsense response to a law that can see the company fined millions of dollars for failing to keep personal details private. But it earned the ire of several companies that make a living from accessing such details.

A letter [PDF] from one intellectual property lawyer representing those interests urged ICANN to take action against what he claimed were "clear and direct violations" of GoDaddy's contract with ICANN. ICANN responded [PDF] with no more than an acknowledgement it had received the complaint.

But the US government has unexpectedly came to their defense, noting in its letter that "the actions taken by GoDaddy last month... are of grave concern for NTIA given the US government's interest in maintaining a Whois service that is quickly accessible for legitimate purposes."

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21 2018, @04:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21 2018, @04:49PM (#670102)

    Um, MDC, what are you talking about?

    The problem got resolved, demonstrating that there is no need for public WHOIS... which somehow means WHOIS privacy is harmful? I hope I'm being Poe'd by a sarcastic post title.

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