This is not an industry scandal. This is an overhyped, news seeking story of a rogue employee using his position inappropriately to obtain private information. There is no evidence that this is more than an isolated incident and the employer has taken the appropriate steps to punish the offender.
I don't see any reason for Moniker to do anything other than handle this internally. That doesn't mean it's being swept under the rug.
When you are a business and you run multiple conflicting interests there is an issue when you experience multiple flagrant lapses of judgment by what you call rogue employees.
The reality is that a serious business that has an active interest in being reputable and trustworthy builds an environment where not only are there few rogue employees, but more importantly, those rogue employees lack opportunity to act.
When a company has multiple instances of questionable activity you have to ask whether they are trying to correct the issue. Firing Chef Patrick doesn't do anything. It's one employee effing up being told to leave. How are they stopping Sous-Chef Patrice doing the same thing?
How is Sommelier Sam prevented from accessing my credit card and defrauding me? How is Host Halvarez prevented from bidding? The problem is a company can only blame employees for so long. Sooner or later you have to build a proper environment with no conflicts.
In my opinion, the repeated failures are nothing less than a continuous neglect of proper business practices. If you can't trust them with a DOMAIN PRIVACY how can you trust them with a valuable domain, your credit card? As a broker - are they misusing your information?
Whois misuse is a huge issue for ICANN right now. How whois is maintained, managed and used is a hot button topic. Bottom line is that a potentially meaningless action shows a continued lack of business CONTROLS on their part. The simply don't have the appropriate procedures, or more importantly, rules in place to effectively monitor their staff's activities.
IF you had ever been in a business that had been audited you would realize just how poor their procedures and data management must be.
All. Just IMO.
---------- Post added at 11:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:06 PM ----------
One final thought. Say Rick had done this but the subject was Chef Patrick (a nice guy) but it was say, the CEO of Enron before that got ripped open would that make it better or worse? What if someone had mentioned Bernie Madoff early on? What about Kevin Leto?
I'm not saying the level of activity is the same in each of these but the fact is that you have no idea where this was going. Was CP looking at Whois under privacy all the time as part of his role as a broker? Was he sharing this with other parties for a long period?
If this had been reported by the New York Times or the Guardian would it have made a difference to your opinion? Lots of stupid hypotheticals. Whistleblowers are never popular - less so when you are already hated by many to begin with like RS.
The lone reality is that imo Moniker isn't trustworthy until it explains how it intends to correct the issue (agents can't go under privacy unless they are authorized and their access is logged and reviewed monthly) etc