ICANN seeking input on ceding control of WHOIS privacy to governments [pdf] (opens in new tab)

Well, time will tell what happens after the review but we all know what ICANN has done in the past!

That's the impression I got from reading the EFF report on it; the GDPR makes WHOIS essentially impossible.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/europes-gdpr-will-forc...

Think so?

"The public WHOIS would include an anonymized email address or a web form from which messages could be forwarded to the registrant email address."

Everyone ignores that in order for a blockchain to work, there needs to be a governance model that weeds out bad actors. In finance markets, this is somewhat ok because the governance model of laissez-faire economics (a common mental model to apply to finance) is simply “buy at your own risk”. That governance model won’t work for something like DNS — if control of a DNS name is maliciously reassigned, there would need to be some agreement around how that gets done and who has the authority to do that.

Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized authority model that Bitcoin has, it’s going to be a tiered trust authority in the same way that SSL roots work today. You’re going to end up with very similar governance models and the same organizations, just implemented in blockchain.

I think some of the important impacts of blockchain are yet to be recognized: I do think it will force us to fundamentally think about what consensus and rule of law means in any given scenario, and that will have some pretty outsized social impacts — especially in the way we run organizations.

We will have to be far more deliberate about how we design our governance models, but I worry they will become so complex as to grow beyond the possibility of oversight...