Is WHOIS going to go away?

Fri Apr 20 03:31:58 UTC 2018

On April 19, 2018 at 22:43 johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) wrote:
 > In article <23257.12824.250276.763926 at gargle.gargle.HOWL> you write:
 > >So you think restricting WHOIS access will protect dissidents from
 > >abusive governments?
 > >
 > >Of all the rationalizations that one seems particularly weak.
 > 
 > Oh, you're missing the point.  This is a meme that's been floating
 > around in academia for a decade: the brave dissident who somehow has
 > managed to find web hosting, e-mail, broadband, and mobile phone
 > service but for whom nothing stands between her and certain death but
 > the proxy whois on her vanity domain.
 > 
 > If someone makes this argument you can be 100% sure he's parroting
 > something he heard somewhere and has no idea how the Internet actually
 > works.

+1

I'm more sympathetic to for example abused women who I can see have
little wherewithal to figure out every way to hide their (new) contact
information. Unlike political dissidents they didn't volunteer for
their situation.

Nonetheless I don't think crippling the entire WHOIS system for
everyone for cases such as this is a reasonable approach.

As they say hard cases make bad law.

Educate people, maybe in particular domestic abuse lawyers and
counselors, about better alternatives such as clicking the little
privacy option box on their registrar's domain registration
form. There, that wasn't very hard, but it's only a tiny part of their
problem anyhow, unfortunately.

Maybe we need to get back to the GDPR which is actually driving this
WHOIS discussion.

For example:

  Facebook to exclude 1.5 billion users from GDPR privacy protections

  https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/19/facebook-exclude-1-5-billion-users-gdpr-privacy-protection/

or

  http://tinyurl.com/y9abrw37

 > R's,
 > John

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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