Congress Eyes Whois Crackdown

Decius6i5 writes "The Washington Post is reporting on a Congressional hearing in which it was proposed that putting false or misleading information in your DNS whois record should be a federal crime. Texas Representative Lamar Smith is quoted as saying 'The Government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities online.' The article claims 'Smith and Berman drafted the bill after receiving complaints from the entertainment and software industries that much of their material is made available for free on Web sites whose owners are impossible to track down because their domain name registrations often contain made-up names.' Its funny, I don't recall the RIAA having any trouble tracking down P2P users whose IP addresses didn't have any DNS names associated with them at all. This isn't the first time the issue has been raised in Congress but apparently Congress hasn't gotten any more clued after several hearings."

Comments

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[American AC in Paris]

From the Washington Post article:

The bill would not affect people who are trying to safeguard their privacy because it only makes it a crime to submit false registration data when it is done to help commit a crime, said Mark Bohannon, senior vice president for public policy at the Software & Information Industry Association, which supports the bill.

Oh, fer Pete's sake, Taco. Would it really hurt all that much to give a full, accurate blurb on this one?

This isn't about forcing people to use their real name when registering a domain. This is about increasing the severity of the punishment for committing online fraud. Basically, if you commit fraud using a website with faked credentials, you'll face a stiffer penalty than you would had you committed fraud on a website where you used legitimate credentials to register.

I'm not saying I've fully researched this, but it sure as hell isn't the rights-trampling orgy the blurb makes it out to be, Taco. Do your homework before posting half-informed diatribes to the front page.

Re:I find this idea disturbing.

[American AC in Paris]

If they were talking about criminalizing false WHOIS information, I'd agree with you 100%.

Trouble is, that's not what they're doing. They're talking about creating harsher penalties for people who commit fraud with a website registered under fake credentials.

They're not going to go hunting you down for having false information. Rather, if they catch you committing fraud on your website, they'll tack another few years onto your sentence if the site info wasn't accurate.

You gotta stop believing what they say in the front-page blurbs.

Re:I find this idea disturbing.

[pavon]

If the RIAA and MPAA can't find the fake WHOIS record owners, how is the government going to track down the WHOIS record owners and punish them?

Very simple. If the registrar can't contact you because you gave them bogus info then the registration gets dumped. Quite an effective and fair punishment - you are abusing a priviledge so that priviledge gets revoked.

Although I do understand where you are comming from with regard to address harvesting from public WHOIS records. If you were to implement this policy you would have to provide the option for registrants info to remain private to the registrar. Then it wouldn't be such a burden for honest people to provide the correct information.

Some Canadian registrars have the idea re. privacy

[fatwreckfan]

Some Canadian registrars, such as Internic.ca offer a service called Privacy.ca that hides your registration information, so random people can't look up your info.

If it becomes a federal crime to lie in domain records, something similar could be implemented to protect those who want to remain (somewhat) anonymous.

Re:Who controls WHOIS?

[isa-kuruption]

Domain name registrations are controlled by ICANN which is a Congressionally funded organization.

From their website:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. These services were originally performed under U.S. Government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other entities. ICANN now performs the IANA function.

ICANN then contracts out services to corporations for manage the DNS registrations. Currently, VeriSign controls .com and .net.