An Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers committee is considering a sunset proposal at its meeting this week in Los Angeles that would effectively scrap the directory system on privacy grounds. Among those arguments is that a public-by-default Whois listing may run afoul of Canadian and European Union privacy laws.

Having this debate is not a bad idea. It’s about time that we rethought whether the Whois directory service–which has public contact information for domain name owners–should exist in its current form.

Trademark and copyright holders, and their lobbyists, are opposing this move. They argue that a public Whois database is necessary to help track down trademark infringements, copyright infringements, and “cybersquatting.”