Photo: Claudio Schwarz Purzlbaum

Rights Alliance calls for the reopening of access to important database

Apr 15, 2020 | Analysis, Collaborations

15. April 2020

In cooperation with a large number of organizations working to combat illegal Internet sites, Rights Alliance has signed a call for ICANN to ensure the possibility of identifying who is responsible for the illegal sites.

Domain names are a vital part of the Internet’s infrastructure, and therefore it is important that there is transparency in relation to who is responsible for the individual domains. The requirement to provide your name and address in connection with domain registrations, and the fact that it is possible for everyone – both authorities, companies and private individuals – to look up owners, makes it more difficult to be a criminal online.

Therefore, it is problematic for the fight against online crime that ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in the wake of the EU GDPR regulation on protection of personal data, in 2018 closed the access to the so-called WHOIS database. The database contains information on all the domain names and IP addresses that ICANN assigns and manages. With the shutdown of access to the database, the possibility of identifying who is behind illegal pages was also lost.

Therefore, more than 50 organizations, including Rights Alliance, have signed an invitation to ICANN to once again ensure the ability to efficiently identify the owners of the illegal sites.

An important database

The wide range of signatories covers organizations that fight illegal sites on the Internet. The sites being combated cover everything from rights violations and the supply of illegal drugs to child abuse. This wide range of online crime simply underlines the importance of reopening access to the WHOIS database, as the ability to identify culprits affects many types of crime.

The signing organizations include Motion Picture Association (MPA), International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Premier League, as well as Inhope and EU Kids Online.

The inquiry points to the problems with ICANN’s shutdown of access to the WHOIS database and the challenges facing organizations such as Rights Alliance in the wake thereof.

To Rights Alliance, specifically, it is among other things important to be able to make ‘backward’ lookups in the database so that all domain registrations belonging to the owner of an illegal site can be quickly identified and effectively taken down or blocked if they also are illegal.

Rights Alliance has shared the call with the Danish Business Authority, which, as Denmark’s representative in ICANN, shares the views.