The committee of ICANN, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is better known, represents one of the most powerful organizations behind the Web. It is the organization that is in charge with managing the Internet domain names system and so on.

And now, its recent decision related to the WHOIS database most recent controversy is to leave it as it is. The ICANN’s decision is not permanent, but the WHOIS database will remain at least for now.

The Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Number’s committee’s decision comes after the committee’s members have voted on Wednesday 17 to 7 to continue studying the issue. The Generic Names Supporting Organization, as the ICANN’s committee is called, has voted 17 to 7 against a proposal that would have allowed the so called “natural persons”, that is the people who register domain names for purposes other than conducting businesses over the Internet, to list the contact information of designed third parties (rather than their own) in the ICANN’s WHOIS database.

The WHOIS registry represents the legacy database of the domain names system and it contains the names as well as contact information of those who register Internet domains. Currently, any interested person is able to access this database, and this is way the privacy advocates have argued that the information within the database should be shielded from the public eye for protecting the privacy of individual registrants.

But the ICANN has decided to consider privacy measures for the domain owners, but also to retain the existing WHOIS system.