ICANN day 0
You might think, after almost 8 years of study, debate, and so forth, we'd be done with WHOIS. We're not. Today we were churlishly reminded by the members elected to the GNSO Council (think "Hairspray" if you draw a blank) by "the Business Constituency" (a fraud that consists of three people and a dog), that privacy is frivolous, and that spam, porn, phish, and so on are what happens when WHOIS doesn't provide accurate data ...
At least we're no longer terrorists. The climate has slightly improved and the usual Federal Clowns aren't present doing dog-and-ponys on the mission of the moment.
The absurdity of it is beyond words. In a universe of 170,000,000 data points, what sample size is required to provide a degree of accuracy, and how much time to manually process each response, if a survey to determine ... oh, and no one actually has a hypothesis that can be tested, but the day when WHOIS is shut off is moved another several years into the future, so that "studies" can be done.
On one side of the table is Intellectual Property Constituency, the (fake) ISP Constituency and the (fake) Business Constituency, all citing G-Men and boogie-men for why privacy is a very bad thing. What they really mean is they can't be bothered with tiered access, with proving a data request is reasonable, they just want access without restriction (just like the {spam | porn | phish | ...} sources, who harvest the same data from the same sources -- the one thing we do have useful stats for.
On the other side of the table are the evil, horrible, profiteering Registrar Constituency, the evil, horrible, profiteering Registry Constituency (I wear both hats), and the evil, horrible, profitless non-commercial and at-large Constituency.
Jean Paul-Sartre is buried just down the street. I suppose his being dead means he doesn't have to worry about his personal privacy, or spending time before going on to Soviet Hell (from an old IWW song my dad taught me) listening to pious cant about how WHOIS protects us from spam, porn, phish, and the next best exploit, while direct advertisers and Google accumulate and corollate personal data and monitize that "legally".
