ICANN São Paulo meeting site

For people interested in Whois, the Sao Paulo meeting is a pretty important opportunity for influence. Two Whois items were posted for public comments on the ICANN website, and we took comments on them both during the GNSO public forum on Monday.(chatroom discussion here) The good news is you don't have to be here to take part. Anyone can comment on both topics below until January 15th, by clicking through the title links.

Preliminary Task Force Report on Whois Services
This is the latest stage in the ongoing Whois policy development process. The Whois Task Force has put together a report with two different approaches to Whois. There is still a lot to be resolved on this issue, and there are even rumours floating around of new approaches. So this is still very much an area of flux where people's comments can have a real impact.

That said, I've observed that the comments that have the most impact are the ones that answer directly to the issues raised in the report. Put less diplomatically, high level statements of principle may satisfy the commenter's desire for expression, but don't really help the community representatives who have tough decisions to make. Secondly, comments that bring new information to the debate can really help to shape it.

Here's an example; earlier in the year, we ran a public comments period on the purpose of Whois. One input that came up again and again in subsequent discussions was from an unlikely source; the American Red Cross. (see page 16 of this report) It stuck to the topic, but opened people's eyes to an unexpected application of the Whois service.

I know it's a lot of work to respond effectively to a call for public comments. But as someone whose job it is to summarise these comments for decision-makers in the GNSO, I can report that they are taken very seriously by the task force and the GNSO Council. Public comments really can affect the outcome of a PDP.

Procedure for Potential Conflicts between Whois Requirements and Privacy Laws
The second Whois item is probably less contentious, simply because it's about the implementation of a concluded PDP. (That said, we've built in extra time for GAC members to review it.) It's a call for comments on a draft procedure for how staff should respond to potential conflicts between a registry/registrar's contractual requirements on Whois with their own national privacy laws.

At a meeting yesterday, someone said that for a procedure that took 6 months for staff to draft, it matches almost word for word what the task force originally suggested. True. Perhaps it reflects the inverse of Mark Twain's quip that he could only wrote a long letter as he didn't have time for a short one.