back to article Furor rages over ICANN and Facebook's bid to publish home addresses of website owners

A row over online privacy and domain-name ownership has reached its peak on the last day of its public comment period. The proposal put forward by domain name overseer ICANN will prevent any owner of a "commercial" website from using so-called proxy services – where a third-party provides their corporate details on the records …

  1. Mark 85

    If ICANN is smart, they will let this die... a rather quick death I would hope. The two main supporters, well I can see their reasoning... it's about information collection without due process for what might be an RIAA troll and then there's FB. They want all our data anyway.

    1. Daniel B.
      WTF?

      The smell of RIAA

      ... is all over this proposal. They were unable to get SOPA/PIPA/ACTA passed, so of course they're trying to sneak this crap into ICANN.

      Any real criminal activity would result in the proxy domain registrar being subpoenaed. This is an obvious attempt to circumvent the law, with the MAFIAA forcing registrars to engage in mass-doxxing. A boon for copyright trolls like the long-gone ACS:Law, but even more for those big-ass internet trolling groups.

      The worst thing that might happen if this gets approved would be activists getting "doxxed", and probably killed. This is really, really BAD.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Seeing the irony of posting AC!

      I have several domains registered in my own name/address from long before I ever heard of the possibility of proxy registration - as opposed to my name c/o a hosting company - what did people do before these things were available? Were they prepared to stand by what they published or allowed to be published? All I ever got were those domain renewal scam letters. Maybe my sites are too boring?

      When someone scrapes a load of postings from a forum and your name suddenly appears on an anal inspection discussion board and you can't find out who to 'go and visit' then that is a problem especially when you have to wait six months for someone to bother looking at the proxy registration mailbox.

      Copyright laws are crap but if you have a website you should take some responsibility for what goes on there. If it's illegal then get someone in a different jurisdiction to be the registrant, works well enough for politics. If it's not legal anywhere then you can piss off. If you want to make money from it then you can have your name up there and pay taxes like the rest of us or piss off. Corporates that don't pay taxes can piss off too.

      Is this really a conspiracy led by anti-warez lawyers?

      1. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

        I have several domains registered in my own name/address from long before I ever heard of the possibility of proxy registration - as opposed to my name c/o a hosting company - what did people do before these things were available?

        They either did not put up their own web site or lied about their name and/or got a PO Box address, or simply stuck with their ISP or other provider services which gave them some sort of domain which used their username without revealing their true identities.

        If it had not been for proxy registration anonymity I would never have put up my first site. It is bad enough getting death and rape threats for some innocuous comment when anonymous, downright frightening when those nutjobs have your full address.

        Law enforcement can obtain full details of a site owner from the proxy registrars so there is no need to have it publicly known.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Fair enough reasoning and thumbs-down understood too. Maybe some clearer definitions and publicly visible internationally agreed guidelines for law enforcement and to make sure members of the public have clear avenues of redress that don't disadvantage those without armies of expensive lawyers.

          Not helped by too few people knowing the consultation had already been on and was about to close.

  2. BornToWin

    Gee...

    ...what could be wrong with that idea? DUH!

  3. ratfox
    Paris Hilton

    Why Facebook?

    What has Facebook to win from such a rule??

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Why Facebook?

      Push more small businesses to use F***book instead of their own website.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: Why Facebook?

      A couple of things, I think....

      1) It fits in with their policy of "real names" on FB along with all the personal info you'll hand to us. What I'm hearing is that every week there's new "survey" questions and pop-ups asking for additional info "for your profile".

      2) If your a business owner they will be able to contact you directly with personalized mail instead of running emails through your website emails or host mails.

      FB definitely has ulterior motives... the above is speculation, the reality is buried somewhere in the FB hierarchy.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How would this square up...

    ...with the EU's privacy rules (and Art. 12 of the UDHR)?

    I do note, albeit without having looked into how ICANN define the term, that a "commercial" site might very well be run by an individual or groups of individuals (to whom the aforementioned protections apply), not just by companies and organisations.

    I also wish to note that .eu and .fr domains, for example, have such privacy protections built-in (I don't know if it's even possible not to have your data anonymised), and that's hardly caused any problems in all these years, that I'm aware of.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So will facebook.com show Mark Zuckerberg's home address?

    If not, they aren't serious about this plan.

    1. ratfox

      Re: So will facebook.com show Mark Zuckerberg's home address?

      I don't think his address is a secret. There were quite a few article mentioning it on this very web site.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So will facebook.com show Mark Zuckerberg's home address?

      That may be so, but he should get the same chance to be added to useless mailing lists by unscrupulous marketers like the rest of us!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My address

    As i sit here in safety of the anon moniker, yes i see the irony and it is intended. I have websites aplenty of which none of them registered to my current address. Could you believe it, I moved house a few times, so my domains have a sprinkling of address's over the past decade or so.

    OMG !! why didn't I upgrade them all immediately when i moved ? Just can't be arsed, sorry. If a government entity really needs to get hold of me, they can check my reseller account and invoice details Via the legal route. Joe bloggs has no right or need to know my personal current address.

    Why should our personal address be registered anyway ??? What is the need for it

  7. Christoph

    Besides activist sites there's help sites for all sorts of personal problems - rape and abuse survival, stalkers, etc. where the person running it may have very good reason not to have their details exposed. If they ask even for donations to help with paying for the site hosting they will get hit by this.

    Similarly for lots of other things. Someone running a web comic featuring gays or transexuals might not want their boss to know about it.

  8. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Coat

    "ICANN staff will propose pulling out"

    As far as XXX is concerned, I've heard that that method doesn't work all that well.

    Right, I'm going.

  9. jilocasin
    Facepalm

    Public WhoIs dates back to a simpler time.

    The problem, of course, is that the public WHOIS database harkens back to a simpler time. A time when there were few servers, mostly government (including military), research labs, and academia. DNS predates the web as we know it (by quite a bit). Back then, servers weren't run by little Timmy, some social justice warrior, or grandma's blog on religious themed embroidery. They were run by actual systems administrators.

    When servers did unexpected things, it was important to know who to contact. In some cases it was important to know that fairly quickly.

    This is _nothing_ like the situation we find ourselves in today. The vast majority of domains today are for web sites. The vast majority of those domains _aren't_ managed by their owners. The content, yes, the actual servers, not so much. In that environment the reason for having publicly available contact data doesn't make any sense.

    If "myMusicFromTheMan.org" blog starts DOSing the IRS.gov website, how does knowing that Mr. Tim I Am from London, UK is the registered domain owner help? Mr. Tim is using some web hosting service (say GoDaddy) to host his site. You would need to contact GoDaddy to get the server to stop doing that. Mr Tim may be all over how the RIAA/BPI et. al. are evil, but wouldn't know Apache from Jetty, from IIS.

    Who having Mr. Tim I Am publicly listed _would_ help, would be; BPI, random trolls, and anyone who doesn't like his blog posting.

    ICANN can require that the "technical contact" (a.k.a. the entity responsible for actually running the server(s)) be correct and public. But since that is rarely the owner, having a proxy contact should more than suffice for any _legitimately_ legal resons.

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