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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
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.
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.
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