If you happen to live in a part of the world where freedom of speech is actively persecuted then I agree it's better the way it is. However, if you live in a world where democracy and due process is well established and you are not intent on doing illegal things then it can only help law enforcement and private citizens/organizations to seek justice under those laws.
That's exactly my thoughts, if the DNS system was designed today, it would probably be decentralized, automated & anonymous, whois information comes from another era.
Democracy and due process are only well established to the extent that the values that underpin them are supported and taken to heart by the people.
These values aren't self evident on a collective level. Social-economic, political, ecological, technological, cultural climates are either favourable or make upholding them rather difficult.
> you are not intent on doing illegal things
This is the exact crux of the matter. What is legal or illegal is subject to change and hinges entirely on who's in power.
> it can only help law enforcement
You could be happily giving up your personal data to authorities in a stable, peaceful context where law enforcement policies are genuinely geared towards protecting individual civilians and upholding basic human rights.
It's far harder to retract that when context shift and that same data is used to actively enforce policies that pull away from those same human rights.
A functional representative democracy consists of a separation of judicial, executive and legal branches consisting of elected mandates that can and should be held accountable at all times. Justice implies that any and all citizens are treated equally and impartial within the confines of that system.
Facebook feeling that they aren't treated equally because they can't enforce their trademark? That's entirely valid. But those feelings don't justify a demand that society should compromise on fundamental principles of judicial or legal equality or impartiality in order to enable Facebook to crack down on trademark infringement at their own discretion (not to mention the blatant violation of privacy attached to that).
All in all, the main difference between Facebook and a small time forum administrator is scale. Facebook has 70 billion dollars a year in revenue whereas the latter my earn pennies on Google ads. The size of that revenue can never be an argument to compromise on basic human rights for billions or change how legal systems favour particular private actors because they pushed for relentless economic growth on their own accord.
Of course, while it's obviously hard to enforce such principles in all cases, the trouble with adding exceptions is that they gradually erode those same principles and values until they become meaningless.
There's a reason why Lady Justice wears a blindfold, after all.
> then it can only help law enforcement and private citizens/organizations to seek justice under those laws.
In what way is law enforcement prevented from seeking justice in this case?
Private citizens need to use the legal system to get that data, but that prevents all of those nefarious actors from getting your information without due process.
Like you said, due process is well established, so why would you want to do away with due process?
well, warrants work when you have sufficient evidence but what if you need to perform network-analysis to build sufficient evidence.
Case in point is usage of stolen identity:
Criminals probably already use identity theft to buy those domains, but given that the data is obscured by default it would be hard for police organizations to track systemic use of stolen identities.
The ability to detect newly registered domains from known stolen identities would enable
1/ automatic blocking/warning in browsers
2/ Organizations like FB can gain valuable time in sending takedown requests of phishing sites
3/ establish enough evidence of use of stolen identities to get the warrants to obtain more information from the registrars/hosts like IP's used to connect...
Just something I came up with brainstorming, I am sure there's more value to it
> but what if you need to perform network-analysis to build sufficient evidence.
In that case you need to do it another way. There are a tremendous number of things we could do if law enforcement wasn't "hindered." It's along the lines of "argument from lack of imagination" to state that they HAVE to have access to that data to prevent x, y, z.
I don't doubt that it would be useful to have that data, but that doesn't override privacy concerns. You already know the IP address of the server using that domain -- follow up that chain of responsibility.
