The ICANN Expert Working Group (EWG) convened by ICANN President Fadi Chehade in 2012 has finally presented the results of its work – 180 recommendations over 166 pages to rebuild the Whois service.
The need to reform the service that maintains and supplies information regarding the providers and owners of all domain names has been discussed for over a decade, but the new proposals do not look too promising.
In brief, the experts have suggested replacing the distributed Whois environment with a Registration Data Service (RDS) – a centralized database covering all domains new and old and operated by a single entity. Information about domain name owners will not differ much from Whois records. It has also been suggested to add social media user names to the records.
The basic difference lies in the openness of this information and the access to it. Today, data regarding the name of the domain owner or his/her email address are available through Whois registrars without restrictions. RDS has suggested establishing six “Purpose-Based Contacts”, including an Admin Contact, a Legal Contact, a Technical Contact, and an Abuse Contact, for every record. Every contact will require different mandatory information. Thus, a domain administrator won’t have to specify his name in RDS contacts (which is strange in itself). The idea is to protect personal data but at the same time the name of the individual entitled to deal with legal issues is mandatory for a Legal Contact.
Critics rightly note that the overwhelming majority of private domain owners cannot afford to hire lawyers with the only purpose of resolving domain legal issues. Consequently, they will have to deal with these issues themselves, withholding their names in certain places but being obliged to mention them in others.
Access to RDS information is also problematic. The ICANN EWG has come up with several categories providing such access for registrars with different rights (from tax and law enforcement bodies to ICANN registrars and other agencies). The media would be given the same rights to gated RDS data as the “general public,” which would make their work much more difficult.
The EWG has also suggested forming several large bureaucratic agencies that would be responsible for checking RDS data and making entries in the system. This will make the job of registrars harder and will not enhance the protection of registrants. In general, the system of acquiring information concerning domain owners will become more complicated and less transparent. Renown domain blogger Kevin Murphy has noted sarcastically that the EWG package basically proposes rebuilding Whois from the ground up based on ideas first explored by George Orwell and Franz Kafka.
