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from the privacy-fading-away-like-a-sunset dept.
ICANN is currently considering [pdf] new rules that will affect Privacy & Proxy services. Opponents claim this to be yet another effort by big business to bypass due process, as ICANN is being lobbied to make private registrations unlawful for "commercial" use. As it has been argued effectively in the courts that any website with advertisements is commercial in nature, opponents say this can strip private registrations from any personal website or blog that funds itself by ads. Proponents of new rule complain that P/P services are too often slow to respond, to respond at all, and determining the proper entity for legal action is too difficult. Proponents ask that personally identifiable information be disclosed upon written demand to ICANN, without a court order required, with only ICANN ostensibly determining if the written demand is correct, lawful for all parties, and suitable grounds for bypassing due process in the domain holder's country.
Namecheap.com, the EFF, and Fight For The Future currently have a campaign going to call and write into ICANN before the deadline for public comments, on July 7, 2015. Of course, you can call them directly (busy signal all day) at their LA offices - +1-310-301-5800 to make a comment, or email them directly at comments-ppsai-initial-05may15@icann.org and policy-staff@icann.org
ICANN is currently only seeking comment, and is unable to come to a consensus on this issue yet. Assuming ICANN does eliminate P/P for everyone, we are left with the Distortion part of Avoid-Distort-Block-Break.
How would Soylentils respond to the lack of private registrations?
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday June 26 2015, @06:12PM
i've only seen "Privacy & Proxy" services used by domain name squatters and other disreputable businesses. you should be free to post what you like but you shouldn't be free from the consequences of such actions. P/P only help to obfusticate registration information from those who don't have a lawyer at their disposal. who are P/P services really protecting and who are they protecting them from?
I understand some may desire the illusion of privacy but it comes at an unjustifiably high cost for everyone else.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday June 26 2015, @10:21PM
You're looking at it wrong. I don't think anybody is saying to remove people from consequences.
As for the unjustifiably high cost..... do you drive around with your actual home address on your license plate? Does the back of your t-shirt contain the GPS coordinates of where you sleep? Of course not. So this isn't an illusion, it's real privacy. Nowhere else is anyone demanded to publicly publish their real contact details and home addresses, and in nearly all cases, such information is protected by law, and disclosures are heavily regulated.
Let's address your issue of squatters and disreputable businesses. The squatter deal is just dead wrong, and quite frankly, stupid unless it's completely free. In any case, squatters have the business model of buy/sell domains so they will be highly motivated to respond to communications. So no problem with the squatters. Disreputable businesses? Not exactly. The other poster pointed out SPAM, and for such a small cost to have a business answer the email, answer the phone, and deliver you messages is a good thing. Businesses in general *wish* to be contacted. I fully expect that P/P to be forwarding to me all of the email actually. Not filtering it for SPAM, or even answering it really. Just forwarding it to me. As for answering the phone, yes, I fully expect my messages to be delivered.
Free of consequences? You seem to imply that a P/P service can just outright block consequences from happening. This simply isn't true. While you may disagree with the fact you need to have your lawyer file a subpoena to access that information, that doesn't mean it isn't fully within due process and on the "up and up".
That unjustifiably high cost you mention is purely the "extra added" cost of our judicial systems working the way they were intended. *IF* there are P/P businesses that are not acting properly, then the answer is not to outlaw P/P, but to create huge fines when the P/P doesn't get contact with the domain holder within a reasonable time period. You can make it really simple, by just mandating that a P/P that doesn't effect contact within 10 business days can cause a 30-day countdown to where ICANN can just disable the domain name with entries to 127.0.0.1.
As a P/P customer I wouldn't object the reveal of my information as a result of my negligence or willful ignorance of the situation. If I was out of the country, I should have hired somebody to take care of it, or maintained the ability to be contacted. 40 days is a pretty long amount of time to be completely without contact.
Sorry, but due process is never unjustifiable, or too costly for a society. The most I'm willing to do is to mandate that any registered business, sole proprietorship, etc. provide it's full legal contact information for the business. That is fairly standard as a requirement doing business, and it's hard for me to justify anything but small activist groups remaining private to hide literal home addresses and residences. That legal contact information can always be a lawyer . On that, you have no hope of change. So as long as a P/P is formed by a lawyer, has one on hand like debt collection companies, you can do nothing about them legally representing their clients. All you can do is punish the lawyers for bad behavior. Let's not really talk about that, since it puts me into full Godwin mode talking about the Final Solution and the bottom of the Marianas Trench :) We have to deal with the lawyers outside of the DNS too.
It's also worthy to point out, that unless you are talking about the dregs of society who are difficult to bring into a court room anyways (with their shallow pockets too), just about everyone else will have an address suitable for legal service, and a P/P that is lawyer based can actually receive service on behalf of the client!
So how many different ways can I show you today how consequences can currently be enforced against a domain holder? At least in the USA.... the rest of the world needs to take care of its own legal environments.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by Pino P on Saturday June 27 2015, @01:35AM
Nowhere else is anyone demanded to publicly publish their real contact details and home addresses
Then you must not be familiar with laws comparable to the Impressum law in Germany [wikipedia.org]. Both the European Union [sitetruth.com] and the State of California [sitetruth.com] have laws against anonymous Internet businesses.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday June 27 2015, @02:06AM
Nowhere else is anyone demanded to publicly publish their real contact details and home addresses, and in nearly all cases, such information is protected by law, and disclosures are heavily regulated.
that's not true at all. if you buy property, all that info is on file and publicly available. a domain name is like land, it's a finite resource that is bought and sold so i think the owners should also be publicly listed.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday June 30 2015, @05:39PM
My personal apartment? Not right now. But I'm planning to open a business soon, and you're damn right I'm gonna put the address on my car, and on my clothes, and *everywhere else* I can get it!
What's up with all the comments about peoples' personal info? The rule change is for *commercial* registrations. If you own a business, and you're not willing to make any contact info for that business public...why the hell are you in business in the first place? This is no more violation of your privacy than the phone book.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:37PM
Maybe that's why you need to read TFS & TFA? The rule change *isn't just* for commercial registrations, and may apply to *consumer* registrations. Hence, the situation. Furthermore, no rules have been made just yet. Only proposed rules being discussed with public comment.
I will quote myself from the TFS:
The link to the article about how ads are being construed as commercial activity is here: https://domainskate.com/google-adsense-operation-at-forefront-of-udrp-over-samsunghug-com-domain/ [domainskate.com]
Otherwise, I completely agree with you. Businesses should be regulated to provide timely contact information in their registrations, or the agents they elect to do so, must provide timely responses to all requests. Additionally, I think P/P consumer services should be regulated to be responsive to requests. Otherwise the proponents are correct that P/P serves as a dodge to escape due process.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday July 01 2015, @01:24PM
Yeah, it'll apply to "consumer" registrations, assuming those consumers are using their website to try to sell a product. Which doesn't really sound like a consumer to me. Sounds rather...commercial.
You sure you got the right link there? "Commercial" or "commerce" don't appear anywhere in that link, and I don't see how anything there is relevant...hell, they ruled in favor of the site owner. And frankly, the site in question is one that I would certainly hope these sorts of rules would apply to.
I can understand a need for anonymous publishing -- you can't have free speech without anonymous speech -- but this does not in any way conflict with that. Firstly because you can't really get a domain anonymously to begin with -- the registrar knows who you are. Secondly, you can't take money anonymously -- if you have ads, the advertisers know who they're paying. If you want to publish something truly anonymous you really have to use a free host and a free "domain" (something like a .tk or a subdomain of the host probably)...and that may have ads, but you won't be the one getting the revenue so that shouldn't matter.
There is also the spam problem of course. But anonymous registrations are also quite beneficial to spammers. We need a better system.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday July 02 2015, @01:58AM
The link came from an article being posted. I didn't read it much, and must admit that I assumed it was a court case example (my bad). Pretty much everything hangs on that anyways, since we are worried about tom foolery in classifying consumer as commercial just because of ads. Thanks for letting me know.
It's not true anonymity that I care about though, and it's perfectly fine if *somebody* knows who I am.
That's not any different than the license plate example I gave you. We both know there are extremely good reasons not to be running around in public announcing the location of where you sleep. I'm a big ol' ugly dude that just about any POS out there will think twice about before bothering. That cute little 5'2" college co-ed? She might get followed home, even by a nice guy who just can't help himself. I actually worry about some girls in my life for that reason alone. There *are* bad dudes and predators out there, and don't forget it just because you're not in their food chain.
The Internet is not any different, and given the penchant for doxxing in the presence of undesirable speech, I think it's a very good idea to protect the *home* addresses of domain owners.
We don't need a better system, and that's my point. It's perfectly okay for *anyone* to need to subpoena a P/P. It's not rocket science. In Las Vegas, I can take $25 and a few forms, and proceed to remove your P/P anonymity through due process. So I'm not going to come to the defense of those complaining due process is "just tooooo hard" when it's really their stupidity and laziness of not wanting to download and read forms. If it's a business with lawyers on retainer, they can *really* suck my dick since I think it's pretty shitty of them to complain about legal fees when they're literally a protected class in my country and have all the fucking money. 30 minutes (if she's drunk or stoned) of a paralegal's time and the forms are filled out, and they're always going down to court anyways, so it's literally not costing them much of anything. Those with real complaints aren't in the US I notice. A US court will have no problems whatsoever convincing the P/P to become responsive, especially if the rule change allows ICANN to revoke their ability to operate if they become unresponsive.
Small claims has just as many teeth with subpeona's under most circumstances, and the average Joe is not put out by P/P services *anyways*. So why do we need a better system? Unless you're saying a new kind of distributed and open DNS, I'm going to disagree.
For that matter, if all anyone needs to do is file a subpeona, why do we need to publish an address again? I'm not even seeing the need for an address when the courts can get one with a document and amend the filing from John Doe to EdIII or Urza9814. I just can't agree to remove due process without much better reasoning and justification, especially when the lack of due process causes clear harm to the citizen by default.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday July 02 2015, @12:32PM
It shouldn't take a subpoena to inform a webmaster that their site is being used as part of a botnet, or that it's been hacked, or whatever else.
I'm still not saying we need to force *everybody* to publish their address...just people engaged in commerce. If you're running your site as a business and you don't have a proper business address and you don't want to give out your home address then you can get a PO box.