Re: Not sure I understand
"That is the predicament ICANN are in. Their contract stipulates the registrars must provide contact details of the owner. EU law now forbids that."
They have, as I understand it, a contract with the US authorities that stipulates they impose conditions on registrars. Those conditions, when imposed on EU customers contradict the new EU law. So they can impose the terms on the registrars as per their contract but as the terms are contrary to EU law. At the point where the contract chain hits EU law the term becomes unenforceable.
I can understand that the US authorities with their concepts of global jurisdiction might not like this. However, if they want to keep the Privacy Figleaf in place they need to think very, very carefully about the wisdom of trying to enforce their own contract with ICANN. A graceful way round it would be for them to revise the ICANN contract with words to the effect of "where allowed by local law" slotted in.
At some point the US does need to get off its high horse. Ultimately ICANN's only power is that it runs the root DNS. Would it really be impossible for the ROTW to get together, clone that root and regard the clone as authoritative? And if they did so the US would simply have to follow.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
