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Private .US Registrations Disallowed by NTIA
jnetsurfer writes "Apparently, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration ("NTIA") has decided that domains under the TLD .US have no right to privacy. New domain names ending in .US will not be able to be registered as "private" and current owners of .US names will be forced to reveal their contact information starting "no later than January 26, 2006". This means that you can't run an annonymous website with a .US TLD. If you don't like this, feel free to sign the petition."
Get a .COM
ICANN imposes $2 internet tax
ethics is so overrated (see us gov for examples) you would think people would have a bit more integrity
can you imagine what a mess the Internet is gonna be in 10 years, you think spam and commercialism is bad now, shame because it could of been so much more
I was under the impression that DNS ownership records for other TLDs (E.g. .com) had to be publically? At least in theory, it should also be geniune and correct.
.us be a special case? Being able to find accurate data from a simple whois is an important tool for a lot of network administrators.
Why should
One less TLD for spammers to abuse.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
...is having to pay extra for my domain to be "private"... at least with godaddy.com.
.US domain anonymously, but they still want you to pay extra for it.
I got an e-mail from godaddy yesterday about this ruling, and the whole time I was reading it I was thinking of how godaddy is almost hypocritical in sending such an e-mail.
They want you to sign the petition to allow you to register the
Anonymity should be free.
By following the link from the petition site to the NTIA home page, there's nothing there about this particular decision, and some preliminary hunting hasn't shown up the relevant article for this.
Most of the time us Slashdot readers can find the information for ourselves, but here we are being asked to sign a petition based on the evidence presented by the poster, not by reading the docs for ourselves (of cause we would all have RTFA if it was posted, obviously). I think it's a bit underhand asking us to sign this petition on an obsure decision that is not easy to find, without providing a link to the decision.
If anyone can find a link to the decision I'd be very grateful.
Most of us will pay to register them with a credit card or a check or something with our identity attached to it anyway. If anyone really wanted to find out who owns/runs the domain it wouldn't be too hard. Most of the time, they could also figure it out by tracing where it is hosted and finding some information on who pays the bills there as well.
If you want a free (and anonymous) web page, sign up for some cheesy service online where you are a subdomain of someone else. If not, then pony up and give some legit information to the company you buy the domain from.
Every right has an attached responsibility.
I.e. Your right to freedom of expression is cool as long as you don't express yourself by shutting up other people.
Likewise, an anonymously registered and maintained TLD is useful for only a few things. Most of them wrong. I.e. you can knowingly publish libelous material as long as nobody knows it was put out by you.
Worse yet, you can register a domain, which suggests you are somebody else and then put out information damaging to that person. I.e. r_kelly.us loaded to the gills with kiddy porn.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
If you don't like this, feel free to sign the petition.
.us, don't buy/renew and then tell them why.
At the risk of sounding like a torll, what ever happened with using market demand to get thigns done? If you don't like what they're doing with
No one cares about your signature unless it's written on cash.
I do...
.us domain name and create something that looks real. Especially because we already have official pages under the [statecode].us pages.
But I see your point. Imagine that I could take a
I guess we don't want "attorneygeneral.calif.us" to be a phishing site asking people to sign up for identity theft protection.
Get your Unix fortune now!
The constitutional right to privacy in the United States springs from an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure combined with the et-cetera clauses in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
Of course, there is a huge problem with putting domain ownership contact information out in the public. Not everyone is a business and not everyone has a PO box.
There are plenty of ignorant people out there who can only react to differing opinions, beliefs or behavior with threats and violence. I run a very popular niche goth site and, while I'm not exactly goth myself, there are a lot of people out there who react to things like the school shooting this month by making threats to anyone they can find that fits whatever their own perverted (media-given) impression of a "goth" or "punk" is.
Or, perhaps, a woman running an abortion rights action site who would like to keep her information private. Last thing you want to be is in the crosshairs of some religious nut who believes god is directing him or her to save the fetuses by blowing your brains out.
There are any number of valid reasons to want to maintain some sort of privacy to keep the freaks and nutcases from tracking you down. The most violent thing I've ever seen a goth kid do is pick his nose. But I tell you, I sure was thinking about going into hiding recently when the school shooting occurred.
My inbox and referrer logs are full of spam from holders of .us registrations - to the point that I've considered just blocking the entire TLD. If it were harder to cover your tracks when making a domain registration, then it'd be easier for me to take holders of domains seriously.
You don't need an anonymous domain registration to run an anonymous Web site. You don't need a domain registration to run a Web site at all. Domain registrations aren't anonymous anyway - your information is still vulnerable to subpoena and other legal threats, so those who really need anonymity have always had to use other techniques to get it. The whole point of registering a domain is to allow people to have a way of contacting you; it's the opposite of anonymity.
Before signing the petition, I hope you'll consider that the people anonymous registration benefits are primarily spammers - not the friendly Libertarians next door.
Personally, I don't like the fact that as a private citizen that wants to host his own email server, I have to reveal my real name, phone number, and ADDRESS to every human being on the globe with access to WHOIS.
This can be badly misused, and has been already by spammers. I get an enormous amount of spam aimed at my (formerly) published contact emails, and a lot of it comes in complete with the (obsolete) address data from back then. The ONLY way they could have gotten this information is from WHOIS, and I'm not happy about them having it; they have no legitimate reason to be in possession of that data.
I really like what Namecheap is doing. For an extra five or six bucks a year, they'll hide your real address and give you an anonymized contact address... mail sent to this random address will be forwarded to your real email, invisibly to the sender. So, if there is a problem with your domain, you are still contactable. If there's a legal problem with a domain, then of course the real info is going to be available to any form of law enforcement.
But it's hidden from the casual spammer/identity thief, and I am very, very happy about this.
Requiring people to publish information about a domain is sort of a presumption of guilt...."if you're innocent, you have nothing to hide!" Well, I am innocent and I have plenty to hide...like where I live. If I want to host an mail or a web server, my responsibility is to make sure I can be contacted in case of problems. My responsibility is not and never was to tell you exactly who and where I am, no matter what ICANN happens to think.
Do you own a car? If so then you are part of the automotive infrastructure of whatever state/country you live in. What would you say if a government agency unilaterally required that all members of the automotive infrastructure post their name, address and telephone number in big bold letters on all their vehicles? That way all the other members of the automotive infrastructure can clearly see your identity so that if/when you cause problems, you can be contacted. Sound good to you? It must because that's exactly what you're condoning for the owners of .us TLDs.
This is not 1988. The Internet can't be summed up in a hosts file. Get your head out of the glory days of the past and join the rest of us in the real world.
Typically, the only reason individuals want their own second-level DNS domain is vanity.
.us domain, how can we ever expect that to be true of a .cn (China) domain? Americans hold the U.S. to be a shining example of freedom, but clearly .us is not an example of freedom.
So what? If I'm willing to pay money for a product for my own vanity, and someone is willing to sell it, that's what commerce is all about. Should I not be allowed to anonymously purchase a mirror at the store for my purposes of vanity?
If you're going to connect infrastructure to the Internet, you should be prepared to announce your identity to the rest of the Internet so that if/when you cause problems, you can be contacted.
Says who? All Internet users connect our infrastructure to the Internet every single time we access the Internet, which is 24/7 for a big chunk of the public. That doesn't mean that everyone connecting to the Internet should be identifiable. That would be absolute insanity. Part of what I enjoy about the Internet is being able to do things freely without concern that I am identifiable.
If you don't want to connect infrastructure to the Internet, and just want an outlet for your speech, again, there are plenty of ways to do that that don't involve your own little DNS domain.
So what? Just because there are alternative mediums doesn't make it okay. The Internet is clearly the single most useful medium for the average person to disseminate information. It is very important that a person be comfortable using the medium without fear of identification. Only then do you have true freedom of speech on the Internet.
If we cannot expect total freedom on a
First, in these days of whackers (script kiddie hackers cracking with one hand, stroking themselves over free porn with the other), spam-masters, and other assorted cretins and weasels, what is the point of allowing secret domain registrations? OF COURSE there should be accountability.
Second, if you really need to publish anonymously for whistle-blower reasons, et al, then between open proxies and nym and mixmaster, it ain't hard to put out what you need anonymously. But domain registrations? Come on, we have bigger and more realistic fish to fry in the world of privacy than that.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The flaw in your analysis is that you fail to take into account the economic cost of locating the personal information.
A whois query costs seconds. A qwuery to the DMV can be minutes, hours, or even days (DMVs are state agencies, and there are varying levels of response from the various states).
To take your analogy to an extreme, I will suggest that we are all millionaires. Some people can and withdraw $1 million from an account, while others must work 50 years to earn a total of $1 million. Nevertheless, in both cases, people have possession of $1 million. The difference, of course, is the cost in time.
I got the same letter from GoDaddy (former customer, love how they don't let me unsubscribe without snail-mail), but though I am a HUGE believer in privacy/speech rights, I had a different reaction to it:
.US TLD, a limited (if artificial) resource, just like frequency spectrum, real estate, game animals, trademarks, etc. You are trading some public registration information for a monopoly on a domain name. Get over it.
2 864defd-c34b-403b-a789-6172ffe61186
1. This is only the
2. If you have a legitimate need to be private, don't register a domain name. Not all URLs must be in the form "www\.[^.]{3,}\.us".
3. GoDaddy makes a FREAKING CRAPLOAD of money with their "unlisted" domain "feature." Even if there are NO spammers among their customers, GoDaddy has a huge incentive to spread FUD about information anyone could find in a phone book anyway.
More on my blog:
http://www.tallent.us/blog/CommentView.aspx?guid=
If the domain reserved for a country shouldn't be run by the government of that country, who the hell should run it?
The government makes decisions like this. If you like the decisions, you vote for the same people next time. If you don't, you vote for somebody else. If most of the people who vote disagree with you, you cowboy up and live with it, or move.
Use a different domain if you want to be anonymous.
For those of you who failed miserably at catching the satire in this, let me explain it.
I strongly disagree with the precedent this decision will set. As a strong believer in personal privacy, and an avid internet user, the thought that my personal information would be freely available to any person connected to the internet is scary.
I make the false assumption that by being on the internet, my information is available to everyone.
Leaving information such as my name, address, and telephone number open to the general public (and not just my fellow Americans, either) puts me at great risk of becoming a victim of identity theft, internet scams, computer hackers, and even terrorism.
First, this is information which is generally available freely in a phone book, in online directories, and any number of other places. Should I choose to remain unlisted, I can pay a small fee or buy a mobile phone. Should I choose to remain unlisted in the .us registry, I can buy a different domain name which doesn't have such draconian terms imposed upon it, or write an angry letter to my congressman (which I certainly have done, though it's not quite as it appears here ;). Secondly, it's quite typical of today's sensationalist media to make references to terrorism where it's pretty much irrelevant.
Please reconsider this decision, for my sake, and yours. It is in everyone's best interests to allow those who want to keep their information private to do so.
This part is true.
I firmly believe in the tenets on which this country was founded: truth, justice, and the American way.
Did nobody catch the reference to Superman?
This decision is anathema to these core American beliefs, and goes against the teachings of the Holy Father. He would certainly not like to see His children harmed through inaction by the representatives of His children.
Typical appeal to patriotism, and religious scare tactics.
AND THE HOLY FIRES OF HEAVEN WILL RAIN DOWN UPON THEE, O CONGRESSMAN!
AND IF THE SUPERMAN REFERENCE DIDN'T TIP YOU OFF, PERHAPS THIS ABOVE SENTENCE SHOULD HAVE!