ICANN are supposed to be global. Ignoring the 1st/2nd largest market in the world (depending on what you're looking at, America often comes after Europe in terms of market size etc.) because you happen to be originally based in America is a really dumb idea if you want to have that global responsibility.
America has also had to play ball if it wants European information. Don't want that information? No problem. Want it? Then you handle OUR information in a way compliant with OUR laws (or there's no point having them as everyone will just say "Oh, I spammed you anyway because although I'm European and that's illegal, I just had a US company do it for me". There's a reason that America basically are inheriting our data laws - if they want to trade, they have to be on the same level.
If they don't play ball, they will lose the European market, who will quite happily take their Internet ball home and play a different game. Likely a better one, to be honest. Fact is, if ICANN claims to control/manage every .uk, .eu, .fr, .it etc. domain that it either plays ball or has those taken away from it (i.e. bye-bye 50% of revenue).
The EU has all the jurisdiction over its own data. And it's own top-level domains. And trade that involves any European entity. That's WAY more than enough to have a say.
And, yes, the WHOIS-hiders are breaking the rules, but they were never enforced anyway (mainly because they realised what a stupid idea a public database of everyone's address was). This is way, way overdue. No other place that I sign up to has the right to just put my real name and address on a worldwide, publicly-searchable database that I can't remove it from without breaking the rules (and certainly not for something as trivial as a name to run a website). And they had phone number and email too.
This should have ALWAYS been like this. Law enforcement, sure. Anyone else, no. And it hit personal users hardest as they didn't have a company head office to hide behind.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
