ImperialViolet

ICANN is currently considering a proposal that “domains used for online financial transactions for commercial purpose should be ineligible for [WHOIS] privacy and proxy registrations” [PDF]. Given the vagueness around what would count as “commercial purpose” (tip jars? advertising? promoting your Kickstarter?) and concerns that some commercial sites are for small, home-run businesses, quite a lot of people are grumpy about this.

ICANN has a public comment period on this document until July 7^th and what's interesting is that the comments (those that were emailed at least) are all in a mailing list archive. When you submit to the comment address (comments-ppsai-initial-05may15@icann.org) you receive a confirmation email with a link that needs to be followed and quite a clear statement that the comments are public, so I think that this is deliberate.

I was curious what the comments box on this sort of topic is full of so did a quick analysis. The comment period doesn't close until July 7^th so obviously I'm missing a couple of days worth of responses, but it was a two month comment period so that doesn't seem too bad.

When I checked there were 11,017 messages and 9,648 (87.6%) of them were strongly based on the Respect Our Privacy form letter. Several hundred additional messages included wording from it so I think that campaign resulted in about 90% of messages. (And it's worth noting the the primary flow on that site is to call ICANN—of course, I've no data on the volume of phone calls that resulted.)

Another campaign site, Save Domain Privacy, has a petition and quite a few messages included its wording.

I classified all such messages as “against” and wrote a quick program to manually review the remaining messages that weren't trivially classifiable by string matching against those template messages.

• Nine messages were so odd or confused that it's unclear what the writer believed.
• Three messages were asking questions and not expressing an opinion.
• Two messages were sufficiently equivocal that they didn't express a clear feeling in either direction.
• One message was commenting on a different section of the document.
• One message suggested that WHOIS privacy be available to all, but that it should have a significant (monetary) cost in order to discourage its use.

Many more messages were against and not based on either of the two template letters. That leaves 13 messages that expressed support for the proposal. (That's 0.12% for those who are counting, although I very much question how much meaning that number has.):

• Three messages suggested that private WHOIS registration was contrary to the openness of the Internet.
• Three messages believed that shutting down sites that infringe copyright, or sell counterfeit trademarked goods, was a compelling reason.
• Two writers believed that it was compelling, in general, to have contact details for websites. One of who claimed to be a security researcher and wanted CERTs to have access to full WHOIS details.
• Two messages suggested that it would hinder “cyber-bullies” and “pædophiles”, one of which described how hard it was to have a stalker's site shut down.
• One author believed that being able to contact site owners in the event of a domain-name dispute was a compelling reason.
• One message suggested that WHOIS privacy should be removed for all .com sites, but no others.
• One commenter opined that the Internet is inherently hostile to privacy and thus those who want privacy should not register domains.

The comment period opened on May 5^th, but between then and June 22^nd there were only seven messages. However, the week of the 22^nd brought 10,015 messages. The the week of the 29^th brought 995 more. So I think it's clear that, without significant outside promotion of these topics, almost nobody would have noticed this proposal.