The following message was sent in response to ICANN's solicitation of public commentary regarding the concept of obfuscating WHOIS data:

CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and CAUCE Canada are the leading North American grassroots anti-spam organizations. They are both members of many cross-industry groups including the London Action Plan and the Anti-Spyware Coalition . Both CAUCE and CAUCE Canada are accredited ICANN At Large Structures.

Spam and related misbehavior such as phishing and spyware take a heavy toll on Internet users. Networks large and small devote an ever-increasing part of their resources to anti-spam measures merely to keep their e-mail usable. Phishing and other online fraud cause direct damage to the users who are tricked into responding, and cause all Internet users to be less confident in the Internet and less willing to use it.

WHOIS has always been a key tool for both networks and law enforcement to track and shut down spammers and phishers. Both private and government investigators use it every day to track spammers. Even forged data, which is regrettably common in WHOIS, still allows skilled investigators to link domains to habitual spammers by way of patterns found in the data.

The vast majority of Internet users will never register a domain of their own, and are instead consumers of domains. We are primarily concerned with the interests of the non-registrant majority, but we recognize that some registrants do have privacy concerns, and believe that existing registrar anonymizing servers are adequate to protect them and do not put an unreasonable burden on registrants.

A change to WHOIS that allows criminals a further opportunity to obfuscate their activities by cloaking all WHOIS data will lead to increased levels of privacy violations of by way of spam, viruses and spyware. Removing WHOIS data might provide marginally more privacy to the relatively small number of individuals who register domains, at a disproportionate cost to Internet users at large. We oppose such a change.

Dear Minister Bernier,

As you are doubtless aware, representatives from industry, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), consumer groups and government and law enforcement gathered together from May 2004-2005 in a group known as the Federal Task Force on Spam. We are two of the members of the Task Force, representing Canadian consumers and Internet users, worldwide.

The Federal Task Force on Spam submitted a comprehensive report to your predecessor, the Right Honorable David Emerson in May 2006, which he accepted and offered public assurances that its recommendations would be implemented. Among those recommendations were laws to help deal with the new threat of spam.

CAUCE Canada, CAUCE U.S., and Asia-Pacific CAUCE (APCAUCE) have joined the London Action Plan (LAP). The LAP is a project started by government consumer protection agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission, the UK Office of Fair Trading, and the our governmental contingent includes both Industry Canada and the Competition Bureau. Many European and Asian governments participate as well.

CAUCE looks forward to working with the various governments to help enforce the anti-spam laws that exist, to better understand how the laws do and don't work, and to learn how better laws might be written.

CAUCE Chair Neil Schwartzman attended the meetings in London in October, 2005.

We've also joined the Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group of makers of anti-spyware software and public interest groups. The ASC is hoping to build consensus about definitions and best practices in the area of spyware and other unwanted technologies. The group is made up of representatives from the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, AOL, Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and many others.

While spyware isn't CAUCE's direct area of concern, the legal remedies overlap with those against spam, and the bits of the government that address spyware are the same ones that address spam. The ASC has had several private meetings to work on policy; Neil Schwartzman and John Levine attended the meetings held in Chicago and Berkeley, California in recent months.

The ASC will be holding public events on February 9, 2006 in Washington D.C. and on May 16, 2006 in Ottawa.

In May 2005, the Federal Task Force on Spam submitted a comprehensive report to Minister of Industry David Emerson. CAUCE Canada Board members participated on many of the working groups that developed the various sections of the report, and CAUCE Chair Neil Schwartzman sat on the Task Force itself.

Board participation was as follows:
Consumer Awareness and Education - Genevieve Reed (also a Task Force member)
Technology & Network Management - Chris Lewis, John Levine, der Mouse
Law and enforcement - Chris Lewis, John Levine
Email Authentication - Lynda Partner, Sylvain Carle

Also, Board member Bernard Brun attended the Task Force's public Spam Roundtable held in Ottawa in December 2004.

The work paid huge dividends. CAUCE Canada readily signed off on the report and its constituent parts, including

• Recommended Best Practices for Internet Service Providers and Other Network Operators
  
• Recommended Best Practices for Email Marketing
  
• Three Key Tips for Combatting Spam

As Task Force member Michael Geist noted: "The report called on the government to introduce tough anti-spam legislation backed by significant new financial penalties."

Minister Emerson welcomed the report; both the politicians and Industry Canada worked very hard to develop the recommended laws until the government fell in November. We hope the work will be renewed with equal vigor after the coming Federal elections.

Geist went on to predict "With spam and spyware an ongoing problem, the new government will introduce anti-spam legislation in the spring.Look for potential repeat of the do-not-call embarrassment as lobbyists move in quickly to water down the tough measures found in the bill."

A link to the report can be found on the Task Force public education sites at http://StopSpamHere.ca and http://Arretezlepourrielici.ca/