Milton, Reagrding the soon to be adopted GAC Whois Principles paper, you wrote : "the bulk of the document consists of a laundry list of current uses of Whois, which the document deems "legitimate." A clarification here : the final document says "Whois data is now used to support legitimate activities, including .....". This voluntarily only qualifies the activities (such as law enforcement) as legitimate and not the fact that Whois data is used by these activities. The main reason is precisely that in some countries, the public availability of this data is contrary to privacy laws. So the final text is much less shizophrenic than previous draft versions that may have been circulated. The text basically presents two factual statements : - there are legitimate activities that happen to use whois data - there are concerns about misuse of whois data and conflicts with national laws, particularly those related to privacy and data protection. Hope it clarifies the approach a bit. Best Bertrand Bertrand de La Chapelle French GAC representative