[dow1tf] Amendments to Preliminary Report #1

["Milton Mueller" <mueller@xxxxxxx>]

As we near completion we should make more use of the list.
Teleconferences are better for discussion, but email is better for
nailing down wordings.

I have gone more carefully through Jeff's draft and propose
the following change in the section entitled "Principles for
the use of Whois." 

Existing language:
"Whois TF 1's goal was to strike a balance among concerns and needs of 
the different stakeholders related to accuracy, reliability, access and 
privacy issues and to ensure that whatever process we developed did not 
prevent the free flow of information."

This language is a bit vague and potentially troublesome. There is no 
way we can speak of "not preventing the free flow of information" 
when the whole purpose of this task force is indeed to restrict
some parties' access to information. Besides, there are bad overtones 
to this choice of words. In international treaties and policy, "free flow 
of information" does not mean personal contact data but news,
scientific knowledge, opinion, culture and the like. 

Here is my proposed new language. It is also cleaner grammatically:

"Whois TF 1's goal was to balance the concerns and needs of domain 
name registrants, legitimate whois data users, registrars and registries. 
We recognize the need to take into account issues of privacy and data
protection, data accuracy, registrant accountability, and system 
burdens. We also recognized the need to ensure that whatever 
process we developed must not prevent exchanges of information 
needed to make the DNS as a technical system operate smoothly 
and efficiently."

Hope this is acceptable to all. 

--MM