For years now, WHOIS has been a battlefield between privacy advocates who want to change the system and commercial and law-enforcement interests who want to keep it as is.

The most recent attempt at compromise, involving a large ICANN working group, ended in another and perhaps final impasse last week:

“Finished off” might be a better term. Despite flirting with the kind of compromises and reforms that might actually reconcile privacy rights with identification needs, in the final weeks of the process trust and agreement among the parties broke down completely.

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net's heart - the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved - or not resolved - will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.