No Such Weblog

Joining late, this time. Ruchika Agrawal approaches the end of her talk as I join, asks whether uniform policy for all classes of registrants is appropriate; discusses OECD privacy principles. Mentions inaccuracies when there are no proper privacy protections in place. FTC recommendations on what not reveal to reduce risk of identity theft. Conflict with gobally accessible, publicly available WHOIS as required by the RAA.

Writes Sven Ms on the whois-coordination list: It goes without saying that any contractual obligations (e.g. in a registrar accreditation agreement) can not overrule existing and applicable legislation. … Any future ICANN procedure or rules for Whois should take the existing privacy legislation into account – not only in the best interest of the registrants but also of the *registrars* many of whom might otherwise be left with the choice to either being in conflict with the national privacy legislation of their respective country or in breach of the registar accreditation agreement.

There’ll be another WHOIS conference call tomorrow at 9 a.m. EST. The call will focus on privacy aspects of WHOIS. Speakers include Ruchika Agrawal from EPIC, Alan Davidson from CDT, ICANN director Karl Auerbach, Wendy Seltzer (ALAC and EFF), and Sven Ms from the Berlin state privacy commissioner’s office.

Another call beginning with a symphony of conference system beeps. Mike Roberts moderates.

ICANN has posted a Preliminary Report from the Board’s Special Meeting on 2 June. The compressed version: The board followed the Reconsideration Committee’s recommendations on the pending reconsideration requests; made technical amendments to the bylaws; approved the .biz redemption grace period; adopted a two-track approach to WIPO2 (option C from the General Counsel’s briefing); approved ccTLD agreements for .tj, .pw and .ky; approved some board governance matters; approved travel funding for nom-com selected ALAC and GNSO Council members to Montreal; and made arrangements for the transition which will occur when Louis Touton leaves ICANN.

Here is the software I’m currently using to turn a number of ICANN-related mailing list archives into RSS feeds. The script can deal with most common mhonarc configurations and with pipermail archives (as used by mailman). If it can’t cope with an archive you want to turn into an RSS feed, it’s relatively easy to customize. Thanks go to Wendy Seltzer and Bret Fausett for contributing code and asking the right questions.

(Note that this script works by actually walking through the list archives using HTTP. If you have direct control over an mhonarc installation’s configuration, there’s a more resource-friendly alternative.)

Some brief observations about yesterday’s WHOIS conference call (for those who find my earlier notes too lengthy ;): The discussions on the call were clearly dominated by IP interests and registrars. Registries were on the call, but silent. Various parts of the USG were represented on the call and participated; other governments or governmental entities didn’t even listen in (or didn’t announce themselves during the role call).

The agenda of today’s conference: Reasons we are here / history; a view of the problem; uses and users; the registrar proposal; can we get there from here? Extensive notes inside; errors, typos and misunderstandings are mine. (Update: Fixed some typos. Also, a formal transcript will be made available by the call’s organizers. — 030530, 9pm CEST, tlr. Update 2: Thomas Barret from Encirca writes to make some corrections to a comment by him which I had wrongly attributed to Robert Connelly. — 030602)

Roberto Gaetano makes some interesting predictions and observations in a recent posting to the GA list.

According to this article, some recent German draft legislation may have the effect to move authority over .de from the current, well-functioning Denic to a government agency.