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Fight over Whois access starts early

Kevin Murphy, August 3, 2018, 15:41:44 (UTC), Domain Policy

Starting as they mean to go on? The new ICANN working group on Whois this week saw early, if predictable, divisions on the issue of access to private data in a post-GDPR world.
The so-called Whois EPDP (for Expedited Policy Development Process) held its first teleconference on Wednesday and while not really getting around to the nitty-gritty of policy managed to quickly start squabbling about its schedule and rules of engagement.
It’s already not looking promising that blanket cross-community consensus is going to be reached in the time permitted.
The group is tasked with turning the current Temporary Specification for Whois, which was created by the ICANN board of directors, into a formal consensus policy that in principle has the support of the whole community.
Group chair Kurt Pritz laid out three targets for the group.
First up is a “triage” document, which will basically see the community decide, line by line, what it likes and does not like about the Temp Spec.
In theory, the EPDP could just rubber-stamp the whole shebang and be done with it, but that’s highly unlikely.
Second is an Initial Report, which will include the agreements reached in the triage document and the agreements reached in subsequent discussions.
That’s due in October at ICANN’s meeting in Barcelona, which is ambitious but not necessarily impossible.
The Temp Spec was written with guidance from lawyers and European data protection authorities, so there’s a limit to how far the EPDP can stray, in my view.
Thirdly, and most controversially, is an “Initial Report outlining a proposed model of a system for providing accredited access to non-public Registration Data.”
This is the proposed standardized system that will allow security and intellectual property interests, and possibly others, to see unredacted Whois data like we all could just a few months ago.
Many stakeholder groups are in favor of such a system, but the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group are decidedly not.
The NCSG, given voice principally by academic Milton Mueller, objected to the Pritz/ICANN plan to start soliciting comments on access from the EPDP group later this month, before the group has come to consensus on the so-called “gating questions”.
The gating questions are rather less thorny issues such as whether the purposes registrars collect personal data as mandated by the Temp Spec are in fact legitimate under the GDPR and what data should be transferred from registrars to their registries.
Mueller said that the gating issues represent a “crisis situation” — the EPDP group has just a few months to come to consensus on which parts of the Temp Spec it agrees with — and that discussions about access can be safely pushed back until later.
Perhaps predicting an impasse in future, he also warned Pritz not to over-sell the level of consensus the group reaches if there are still dissenting voices at the end of the process.
Mueller yesterday told the group that NCSG — there are six members on the EPDP team — will refuse to engage on the access issue until consensus had been found on the gating issues.
But NCSG faced push-back from pro-access groups including the Business Constituency, Governmental Advisory Committee and At-Large Advisory Committee.
Alan Greenberg of the ALAC said access talks are “really important” and intertwined with the gating questions. Groups may change their positions on one set of questions based on the discussions of the other, he said.
As it stands today, the group has been asked to fill out four sets of questionnaires, polling their support for various parts of the Temp Spec, over the next few weeks.
The controversial fourth questionnaire covers the access model, but ICANN staff facilitating the group have assured the NCSG these responses will be essentially sat on until the working group is ready to address them.
The group is planning twice-weekly teleconferences in its effort to get its first and second deliverables ready in time for Barcelona.

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