One of the internet’s oddities is WHOIS, the online directory that contains information about the owners of domains. Standing in contrast and opposition to the Net’s prevailing culture of anonymity, WHOIS exposes to all the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of domain owners (unless, through a sketchy workaround, an owner pays a domain registrar to maintain ownership on his behalf). If an owner puts in false information, he can have his domain name registration cancelled.

For years now, WHOIS has been a battlefield between privacy advocates who want to change the system and commercial and law-enforcement interests who want to keep it as is. As Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan explains:

Companies, intellectual property holders and law enforcement authorities have argued in favor of [continued] open access to the WHOIS database on the grounds that it helps them go after phishers, trademark infringers, copyright violators and other crooks. Privacy advocates, on the other hand, have opposed unrestricted WHOIS access on the grounds that it could expose individual domain registrants to spam and unwanted surveillance. They have for some time now wanted the information in the WHOIS database to be shielded from public access.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the directory, has organized a series of committees and meetings in hopes of getting the two sides to hash out a compromise. But no real progress has been made. The most recent attempt, involving a large ICANN working group, ended in another and perhaps final impasse last week, as one of the group’s members, Syracuse University professor Milton Mueller, described in a blog post on August 22:

The ICANN Working Group that was trying to reconcile data protection and privacy principles with the domain name system’s legacy Whois directory, which publishes the name and full contact details of all domain name registrants, was finished today. “Finished off” might be a better term. Despite flirting with the kind of compromises and reforms that might actually reconcile privacy rights with identification needs, in the final weeks of the process trust and agreement among the parties broke down completely.

The working group’s specific charge was to render judgment about a proposal by internet registrars that, as Mueller writes, “would have shielded the registrant’s street address from public view, putting in its place a contact person that consolidated the role of administrative and technical contact in the old system.” Nothing else would have changed beyond the removal from public view of the registrant’s street address. But reaching a consensus on even this small concession to privacy proved impossible, writes Mueller:

It is hard to believe that such a miniscule change could generate three months of contentious work by nearly 60 people, ranging from representatives of each GNSO [Generic Names Supporting Organization] constituency to law enforcement agencies from the US, the Netherlands, and Canada; representatives of the banking and real estate industry; 5 or 6 intellectual property, hoteliers and software producers associations; not to mention a few companies that literally make their living collecting and selling Whois data. But it did.

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net’s heart – the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved – or not resolved – will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.