I noticed that the GNSO Council has approved a particular statement of purpose for Whois:

The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information sufficient to contact a responsible party for a particular gTLD domain name who can resolve, or reliably pass on data to a party who can resolve, issues related to the configuration of the records associated with the domain name within a DNS nameserver.

This statement was chosen over one that would have said that the purpose of Whois was for legal actions as well. The rejected position:

The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information sufficient to contact a responsible party or parties for a particular gTLD domain name who can resolve, or reliably pass on data to a party who can resolve, technical, legal or other issues related to the registration or use of a domain name.

From my perspective -- and I'm not speaking for anyone here, and I don't know what my colleagues on the ICANN Board would say about this -- this seems like an important event.

The Whois discussion has been going on for years and years. Now we have some movement. This shows that things can happen (yes, slowly, but happen) in the ICANN context. It shouldn't be about counting noses on the GNSO council -- it should be about documented consensus. But however you demonstrate consensus, it's certainly important to pay attention to people who are worried about registrant privacy.

This is an area of work that is within the contractual "picket fence" of subjects appropriate for consensus policy development. Now there's some leadership on this subject. Of course law enforcement and intellectual property interests should have access to this information, but it doesn't necessarily have to be public to everyone (and thus subject to abuse of various kinds). This is exactly the kind of discussion that the ICANN forum should foward.