ICANN is to bring in new rules for Whois privacy and proxy services, the best part of a decade after they were first proposed to massive controversy.
It’s looking for volunteers to work with Org staff on implementing policy recommendations that in 2015 led to tens of thousands of people expressing outrage about the dangers, as they saw it, of their privacy being breached.
ICANN is putting together an Implementation Review Team to help implement the recommendations of the Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Policy Development Process, known as PPSAI, which sought to bring privacy/proxy services under ICANN’s regulatory umbrella.
The recommendations were hugely controversial in their first draft, which in a minority statement expressed the view that people should be banned from using their domains commercially if they were using privacy services.
But the IRT will be tasked with implementing the final draft, which expunged the calls for such a ban.
The policy still calls for ICANN to run an accreditation system for privacy/proxy services in much the same way as it accredits registrars. It also lays out rules for how such services should gather registrant data and how to treat customer interactions.
But the recommendations are undeniably from a different era, thunk up before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation made privacy-by-default essentially the industry standard for Whois records.
The PPSAI recommendations now interact with policies and practices that have been adopted in the intervening years, such as the recent Registration Data Policy and the Registration Data Request Service.
People willing to donate 10 to 20 hours a month to the new IRT can check out more details here.
The post ICANN restarts work on controversial Whois privacy rules first appeared on Domain Incite.
