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          How to Make Whois Private

In a very casual and low-key footnote over the weekend, ICANN announced it would be further bypassing the Affirmation of Commitments and ignoring the WHOIS Review Team Report. There will be no enhanced validation or verification of WHOIS because unidentified people citing unknown statistics have said it would be too expensive. Here is the exact quote sent to the Accountability and Transparency Review Team:

Regarding the WHOIS verification goals for the 2013 RAA, while it is true that ICANN initially sought more expansive WHOIS validation/verification requirements, questions were raised related to the costs associated with implementing them on a global basis.

As a topic which has burned untold hours of community debate and development, the vague minimalist statement dismisses every ounce of work put in by stakeholders. For an organization that loves studies, there is no study cited here which demonstrates how the process would be too expensive. And which process? Has ICANN ever requested proposals to develop a validation process? Without actual proposals to review how does ICANN determine it would be too expensive? We all know that WHOIS inaccuracy has been a bone of contention for over a decade now which lead to the AoC section stating:

existing policy requires that ICANN implement measures to maintain timely, unrestricted and public access to accurate and complete WHOIS information

But, now ICANN just decided not to do it.

One of the major outcomes of the AoC was the creation of the WHOIS Review Team to find a path for ICANN to tackle WHOIS. This cross-constituency working group issued a 92 page report which recommended WHOIS become a strategic priority for ICANN (but that would be too expensive). The review team said ICANN should reduce the number of inaccurate WHOIS records by 50% every year (too expensive). But, let me take a step back. ICANN doesn't actually say validation would be too expensive, they merely state that "questions were raised related to the costs." So questions raised by persons unknown is enough to thwart years of effort by the Internet community. Does anyone get to ask questions about the costs associated with bad WHOIS? Are the six phantom compliance employees ready to deal with this?

So, what does this get us? It gets records like the one for the illicit pharmacy site nobledrugstore[DOT]com which is completely BLANK:

Using WHOIS server whois.dattatec.com, port 43, to find nobledrugstore.com
Datttatec.com - Registration Service Provided By: Dattatec.com
Contact: +54 341 599000
Email: dominios@dattatec.com
Website: http://www.dattatec.com

Domain name: nobledrugstore.com
Creation Date: 2012-07-25
Expiration Date: 2016-01-23