[Info] German Court Rules on ICANN Request to Preserve WHOIS Data

[Giuseppe De Francesco]

Milton:

On 3 June 2018 at 19:16, Mueller, Milton L <milton at gatech.edu> wrote:

> Guiseppe:
>

It's Giuseppe, or just Pino, thank you.


>
> The only problem I see here is about culture. USA vs EU cultural gap. To
> any EU person, Whois has always been borderline illegal, but we didn't have
> any law like the GDPR yet. Therefore, we had to keep it to ourselves.
> Meanwhile, Americans made a lot of money by monetising the Right to Privacy
> offering Whois protection as a domain add-on. It's just as shameful as
> monetising public water.
>
>
>
> This “cultural” explanation is incorrect. American privacy advocates and
> public interest groups (such as IGP or EPIC) were leading the opposition to
> Whois, while European law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and GAC members were
> (and to some extent still are) defending it.
>

That's your view, dragging groups in this, while I'm referring to
individuals. There is always a substantial difference between the general
public and advocacy groups.


>
>
> The real explanation relies on the economic interests of particular users
> of the data. Trademark and brand protection agencies around the world (not
> just America) found open Whois very convenient, as did LEAs. Security firms
> were getting free access to and monetizing the data.
>

I did mention the monetisation aspect indeed, that doesn't discount a basic
difference in the culture.


>
>
> A “cultural” explanation of this divide tends to be divisive as it’s based
> on identity politics rather than reason or fact.
>

There is no such a thing as reason or fact disconnected from political
views when it comes to cultural differences. Trying to deny cultural
differences is the beginning of the end of any form of evolutive
cooperation among people. Only by dealing with who we are we can overcome
what is divisive to learn cooperation. This is one of the problems in USA
approach to political science: avoiding any divisive subject trying to
force political correctness into everything. This as well is due to strong
cultural differences: Mediterranean civilizations thrive in debate and love
strong rethorics applied to arguing cases without hiding differences.
Avoiding to talk about differences is not helpful, actually it will cause
even wider divides on the long run because each side will be in denioal
until can no longer keep it silent. This is a major problem in how public
policies are analysed drafted, at least this is my opinion.

Bests,
Pino
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/ncsg-discuss/attachments/20180603/1ece75bf/attachment.htm>