ICANN Accepting Public Comments On Whois Privacy

Decius6i5 writes "ICANN is accepting public comments on its three whois privacy and accuracy working groups until July 5th. Some of the proposals from the third working group, on improving whois accuracy, have been described as hostile to internet users. The working group proposes that if DNS Whois registration data for a domain is inaccurate, the domain should be immediately placed on hold, and cancelled if the error is not corrected within 15 days. An article on Circle ID suggests that the DNS Whois system is not the best way to share contact information for networks, and that ICANN should focus its efforts on improving IP Address Whois instead. What do you think?"

Comments

Well...

[hookedup]

I use namecheap.com to buy all my domains, for an extra $4.95/year per domain, I get whois guard protection.

Do a whois on a domain of mine, and you get contact info to the registrar. Want my real info? Better have a subpoena ready..

Re:Well...

[CeramicNuts]

I paid Netword Solutions $9 year for private registration and immediately received an increase in spam.

Re:whois weirdness

[Sheetrock]

What's happening is people are registering nameservers with goofy names that start with the same text as an existing host.

For example, the folks at gulli.com have made 'GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.CO M' and registered it as a nameserver so that it shows up when you do a whois search for GOOGLE.COM through whois.crsnic.net or other WHOIS servers that try to be helpful when you enter part of a domain name. Not all WHOIS servers seem to do this, but apparently FreeBSD (at least) defaults to whois.crsnic.net.

It's a cute trick, and I'd hate to see it go. ICANN needs to lighten up with regards to their requirements for WHOIS information; spammers and telemarketers abuse the hell out of it no matter how many warnings are put up next to the data. The contacts are less than useful when nobody answers them because they're bombarded with marketing.