ICANN stifles a privacy advocate’s dissent

The Internet Governance Project (IGP) writes:

ICANN’s Expert Working Group (EWG) on Whois and privacy, which published its final report today, has unfortunately continued a long tradition of failing to find consensus between privacy advocates and business interests. The business interests see coerced publication of domain name registration data as an invaluable aid to brand protection and law enforcement, and many brand protection services, who make their living on this data, do special interest lobbying to influence ICANN. ICANN’s staff and board consistently bias their processes in favor of those interests. So nothing has changed, in the end.

In publishing its final report, the lone privacy advocate on the EWG, Stephanie Perrin of Canada, raised some serious concerns about how the EWG was violating basic data protection norms. Her objections were explained over a period of several days. Extreme pressure was put on Perrin to abandon her objections. In the end, she could not agree, and as is the norm, prepared a dissenting opinion. The dissent was provided on time, and the committee was told it would be three pages long. But the chair of the EWG, Jean-Francois Baril, is now suppressing this dissent. He has refused to include it in the report and is excoriating Perrin for not going along.

Read the Ms. Perrin’s dissent here  InternetGovernance.org