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IP Holders Press For Access To WHOIS Data

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the what's-in-a-name dept.

Stony Stevenson writes to tell us that the battle for access to whois data remains at a stalemate this week. "In a blog post on the Internet Governance Project's (IGP) Web site, Milton Mueller, Professor and Director of the Telecommunications Network Management Program at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies and a partner in the IGP, details the Final Outcomes Report of the WHOIS Working Group, published on Tuesday, and inability of the various stakeholders to reach any kind of consensus."

2 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Not just for IP. by bladel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While I consider myself anti-authoritarian, I recognize that there are some situations in which law enforcement and other parties have a legitimate right to pierce the anonymity of private registrations. If someone is operating a site hosting child porn or other illegal materials, the registrar should be required to give up the registrant.

    Also, consider the case where a domain / site has been hijacked (or reverse-hijacked) by a thief hiding behind proxy services at a different registrar. The victim and victim's registrar cannot reliably identify them, and the Registry Operator won't get involved outside of invoking arbitration.

    So keep the lawyers out, but establish some authority (Internet version of a FISA court) that can pierce anonymous registrations.

    --


    Information wants to be Free. Useful Information will cost you.
  2. Re:I still oppose anonymous registration by IBBoard · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You could just as well get a PO box...

    Taking my former blog site as an example:

    I run a private little website as a hobby.
    I pay $25 per year for hosting (reasonable quality host, 75MB disk space and 3GB monthly bandwidth, email, the lot).
    I pay £3.69 per year (~$7-$8) for a .co.uk domain or $9 per year for a .com.

    Total normally: about $35 per year, tops.

    The Registrars follow your "must show details" and I suddenly have to pay £58 per year (~$120) to get a PO Box, or twice that if I don't want to have to keep checking it but instead have it delivered to my real address? (UK PO Box prices)

    Total with PO Box: at least $150 to $250!

    I think the only thing I can say there is "WTF? Hell, no!" That's a ridiculous amount of expense compared to the website itself.