ICANN to debate 'Whois' issues

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is poised to hold discussions next week on the future of ‘Whois’ records –  data revealing the owners of domain names. Set to proceed at ICANN’s 28th International Public Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, the talks will seek to determine whether flaws in the Whois system have left domain owners open to cybercrime and malware attacks, and what course of action – if any – should be adopted to enforce changes.

Delegates to the Public Meeting, which will run from Monday 26 to Friday 30 March, will be free to respond to points raised in ICANN’s Final Task Force Report on Whois Services, compiled by the Corporation’s Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO).

Convened by the GNSO in June 2005, the Whois Task Force was charged with addressing concerns that ‘the amount of data that ICANN requires registrars to display in the Whois is facilitating all sorts of undesirable behaviours like renewal scams, data-mining, phishing, identity theft, and so on.’ It recommends that ICANN should aim to ‘rationalize the Whois data output and implement a new contact type called the “Operational Point of Contact” [OPoC]’

OPoC would ‘remove mailing address information from public Whois, and combine the outdated technical and administrative contacts in an updated role … Additionally, requests that would have formerly been sent to the registrant directly via postal mail or courier would instead be directed to the Operational Point of Contact.’

However, with registrant protection at the forefront of ICANN’s agenda, some industry experts worry that online infringers will be harder to target. International Data Group legal manager, Miriam Karlin, told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘It would just make it that much more difficult and costly to find out who's behind a name.’