IP Justice sent a letter today to ICANN expressing concern about an application for the .Music new Generic Top-Level Domain (GTLD) and its impact on freedom of expression, innovation, and competition on the Internet. Read IP Justice's letter here. (.PDF) Re: Opposition to .MUSIC “Community” Application Based on Freedom of Expression and Innovation Policy Concerns [...]
1 July 2015 To: comments-whois-accuracy-14may15-en@icann.org ICANN Public Comment Forum: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/2013-whois-accuracy-spec-review-2015-05-14-en Dear ICANN, Thank you for this opportunity to provide comment on the Review of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement's Whois Accuracy Program Specification. IP Justice is a San Francisco-based nonprofit civil liberties organization that promotes balanced intellectual property rights and Internet policy that enables freedom and [...]
ALIGNING ICANN POLICY WITH PRIVACY RIGHTS OF INTERNET USERS September 5, 2014 - IGF Workshop from Istanbul, Turkey >> PRANASH PRAKASH: Shall we start? Good morning. Thank you for coming by for this panel on ICANN processes and privacy issues. My name is Pranash Prakash with the Yale Information Society project as well as with [...]
IP Justice Presents IGF 2014 Workshop #149: "Aligning ICANN Policy with Privacy Rights of Internet Users" Day 5 at the 9th United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey 5 September 2014 ~ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm in Istanbul (other time zones) in Venue Workshop Room #6 at Lütfi Kirdar International Convention and Exhibition Center (ICEC) Video Recording [...]
ICANN's Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) sent a letter to a number of Privacy Commissioners and Data Retention Officers regarding proposed changes to ICANN's Accreditation Agreement with registrars that impact the privacy rights of Internet users everywhere. According to the letter, ICANN's contract exacerbates privacy harms, in particular, "the current requirements in the new draft contracts [...]
IP Justice submitted a statement today in response to the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) regarding its relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In its submission, IP Justice argued that ICANN needs a better legal framework that will obligate the organization to respect internationally recognized [...]
NCUC strongly supported Motion #3 because it provided a mechanism to spur uncompromising parties to the negotiating table on Whois in good faith. Without a mechanism to bring to the negotiating table parties who already have what they want, there is no incentive to voluntarily agree to any changes to the status quo with whois. NCUC continues to believe that “sun-setting†the non-consensus policy of Whois is the best course of action for the ICANN Board and the GNSO. There is no legitimate rationale for retaining policies that lack the broad support of the ICANN community, such as Whois. Whois never held a consensus position within the GNSO and it is a tragic mistake to continue with such a non-consensus policy, particularly when ICANN has been warned by national and regional data protection commissioners that Whois violates a number of national laws and international agreements. Reform of Whois is badly and immediately needed to protect the privacy rights of Internet users, bring ICANN into compliance with international law, and remove the legal risk on Registrars and Registries for violations of law imposed by ICANN contracts....
"The purpose of this letter is to express our support for changes to WHOIS services that would protect the privacy of individuals, specifically the removal of registrants' contact information from the publicly accessible WHOIS database. It is also to propose a sensible resolution to the long-running discussion over WHOIS that would establish a bit of "policy stability" and allow the various constituencies to move on to other work. Both the WHOIS Task Force and the WHOIS Working Group agree that new mechanisms must be adopted to address an individual's right to privacy and the protection of his/her data. Current ICANN WHOIS policy conflicts with national privacy laws, including the EU Data Protection Directive, which requires the establishment of a legal framework to ensure that when personal information is collected, it is used only for its intended purpose. As personal information in the directory is used for other purposes and ICANN's policy keeps the information public and anonymously accessible, the database could be found illegal according to many national privacy and data protection laws including the European Data Protection Directive, European data protection laws and legislation in Canada and Australia...."
ARTICLE 29 - DATA PROTECTION WORKING PARTY ON THE PROTECTION OF INDIVIDUALS WITH REGARD TO THE PROCESSING OF PERSONAL DATA Opinion on the application of the data protection principles to the WhoIs Directories (ORIGINAL DOCUMENT AS .PDF) 1. Introduction: The WhoIs directories raise several issues from the data protection perspective. WhoIs data relates to those [...]
The Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) believes that ICANN policies governing the publication of Whois data must be reformed, and quickly. The Operational Point of Contact Proposal ("OPoC Proposal") presented in this Whois Task Force Report is not perfect, but it is the only way to bring some consensus and closure to a problem that has festered for too long. ....