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ICANN Studies Secretive Domain Owners
alphadogg quotes from a Network World piece reporting on ICANN's study of the prevalence of proxy services that shield registrants' personal information from WHOIS queries. "Approximately 15% to 25% of domain names have been registered in a manner that limits the amount of personal information available to the public... according to the preliminary results of a report from ICANN... Domain owners who want to limit the amount of personal information available to the public generally use a privacy [proxy] service. ... [Proxy services] register domain names on behalf of registrants. The main objective of ICANN's study — which was based on a random sample of 2,400 domain names registered under .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info — is to establish baseline information to inform the ICANN community on how common privacy and proxy services are." Spammers and other miscreants abuse the ability to register domains by proxy, in order to avoid being found; but ordinary users have a legitimate interest in keeping their personal information out of the hands of those same bad actors. What's the right balance?
The right balance is what .uk domains have - free information hiding for non-trading individuals, but information displayed for companies. They still have your information, but you don't have to show it to the world and you don't have to pay someone to hide it. As long as "squatting on a domain and pumping it full of ads" is considered "trading" then it's the perfect balance.
where someone's personal information needs to be found out, can't it be found out via a court order if a crime is suspected?
I have registered a few domains by proxy, but the only reason is to have my e-mail address hidden so those pesky spammers won't scrape it of the whois entry.
If you want a domain, you will have to stand that you are public.
If you want to hide your personal information start a company and register the domain on the company.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
no matter how you look at it, either way is abusable.
Nobody yet has mentioned the easiest, most reliable method of registering a domain name anonymously. Just enter fake information in the database. As long as it isn't obviously fake, like Fuck You at Fuck St, Fuck, 11111, it won't get deleted. And you don't have to worry about the proxy company selling it, or accidentally giving it away to hackers.
This of course won't solve the credit card has your name problem, but you can get anonymous debit cards from most grocery stores.
Only, what is it, a day? (sorry i aren't brain today)
I just hope they don't end up suggesting stopping this.
Allow people to register privately as an individual and that'll solve the problems mostly.
Eh, who am i kidding, this won't change anything.
And privacy services like Freenet and the like will only gain from this, which is a very good and very bad thing, depending on who you are.
The primary purpose of
was to
WOW! How informative!
I purchased the domain for my site through my web host, as a result if you look up the domain on whois all you get are the details for the host rather than me.C ould it be that the number is so high because of the average joe registering through a site that puts its own details forward to the likes of whois, rather than because the majority of people are intentionally trying to hide their details. Hanlon's Razor. Or have i just completely mis-understood this.
If you claim to be a reputable business as a payment facilitator on the Internet, don't hide behind a proxy service for your domain name.
A few days ago, I was looking at epassporte.com for a virtual credit card. I ignored them when a lookup on their domain showed they are hiding behing Moniker Privacy Servies.
My only experience with domain registration is with namecheap (and I highly recommend them). It (for free) has a tool called whoisguard which puts all your personal information as a random string of numbers and letters @whoisguard.com (it also has a free dynamic DNS client so people with non-fixed IPs can update as needed). The e-mail itself still forwards to your real e-mail address, but that random string can get updated weekly to prevent it being sold. Simple to say, I never got a single bit of spam.
Funny thing is, I called up namecheap to verify they were legitimate before registering with them and their answering machine gave me the impression that it was a one-man operation. I'm curious if they really are.
In contrast, I used to intern for a business that did register with their real contact information. Besides getting fax spam and e-mail spam, we also got a scammer who used Sprint TTY to try to get us to order 6 laptops through Dell and mail them to New Jersey.
Way back when technical contacts used to use whois data to call each other when there was a problem. Domain contacts were people that actually knew something about networking or system administration. Today this use is pointless. The typical domain owner doesn't manage there network or the systems hosting their web pages. What it mutated into was ICANN helping trademark owners or MAFIAA organizations being able to more easily sue people.
Note that some of the CCTLD owners haven't been strong armed into signing away their authority to ICANN yet and keep contact info out of whois. For example tonic.
I've had about 20-30 domains registered over several years, and I've never used private domain reg, and still it's very rare that spam gets through in my inbox in Gmail, which I have used several years as well. Maybe I'm just lucky or the gmail spam filtering works very well.
ICANN is about to start selling gTLDs. With the gTLDs go all the TOS and AUP authority that ICANN at one point pretended to enforce on .com, .net, and .org (last I heard those three are not yet for sale). Just wait and see how much more spam you'll get when they sell .drug, .pill, .viagra, etc...
.com, .net, and .org so they can pull a huge one-year profit, and subsequently tell those of us who ask them to do their jobs (in registrar accreditation) to STFU.
So what they think they are accomplishing by studying obfuscated domain registration data now, I would like to know. Because soon the vast majority of all WHOIS data in the world won't be worth crap or even have consistent or meaningful requirements.
Part of me wonders if this "study" is just a preliminary step towards them eventually selling all the rights to
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
With all the nut jobs out there, who wants to have their private street address listed in a public database ?
I already have no privacy on the web. If my government decides they want to eavesdrop on my communications through my ISP, they already do it without a warrant.
If I have no privacy, nobody should have any.
I say everyone who hangs a shingle (domain) on the web site should be accountable for it and their names a matter of public record.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I use my attorney's office for my information. You can always use a P.O. Box, or a mail service center.
Fight Spammers!
I hold strong views against powerful/assholy people and institutions.
I have had to endure being "harased" by a criminal (also here) who was able to involve a corrupt police force against me (thankfully, they are grossly incompetent and clueless about the intartubes and I could see them coming for weeks in advance; it took them four months to know who I was online - they did not pursue because I was well beyond their jurisdiction; although they tried).
I want to post my stuff without every Dick, Tom and Harry able to easily find out who I am.
First of all any dedicated spammer or other miscreant can fake contact data with some that is valid but not theirs. Second, you go after the IP not the friggin domain. That's just a label, not the source of the damage.
This is nothing more than a blatant attempts by the Intellectual Property lobby that has co-opted ICANN (Ironic, but an organization that was tasked with making new TLDs hasn't done so in a decade and as of right now, new TLDs are two years away from whenever you ask, just as they have been since 1996, which is exactly what the TM lobby wants) to be able to serve anybody with a summons for IP infirngement. It has nothing to do with any operational issues in the DNS. No really, I checked.
Never mind that even some of the women lawyers involved in the creation of ICANN have been stalked from their whois data (Mikki Barry for example).
If you need clear proof ICANN is just a nexus for the same types that do such good work in the RIAA and MPAA, check this out:
http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/at-large_atlarge-lists.icann.org/2009q4/005957.html
http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/at-large_atlarge-lists.icann.org/2009q4/005960.html
http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/at-large_atlarge-lists.icann.org/2009q4/005961.html
ICANN is only "open and transparent" when you read between the lines.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Reality check:
We take an even harder line on anonymous businesses at SiteTruth, considering them "bottom feeders".
Realistically, putting your real name and address in WHOIS info doesn't hurt you unless you're a crook. My real name and address are on all my domains, and I get maybe one phone call every two years, perhaps a letter or two a year, that seem to come from WHOIS data. I had one threat, back in the 1990s; he's out of business and I'm still here. Any e-mail spam is being filtered out by the usual filters. If you're paranoid, get a P.O. box; that's legal.
... you dont want kids calling you up or knocking on the door asking for free credits and stuff... Yes, it happens.
As a network administrator I feel that proxy services should be prohibited.
If my customers are having a problem reaching your web site, then I use whois to find the person to contact to resolve the issue. This is necessary more often than you might thing due to routing issues. I can call my upstream ISP if the problem is on their end, but if not you may need to contact your ISP so that the problem can be worked on from both ends.
Any domain not listing the actual contact information for the individuals responsible for the domain should be dropped from the db. There are other ways to handle contacts which would not require emails to be displayed. It's that simple. Whois information identifies the mailing address for the registered owner of the domain, and the full contact information for the technical and administrative contacts. For most cases that should be the domain administrators at your hosting company. If you opt to place your own information in those fields, then your information should be made available.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Spammers hide their info. If you're running a legit domain, post your owner and admin contact info. It's part and parcel of running a domain, same as a license plate is part and parcel of driving a car, or your name, signature, bank address, and account number on any checks you write.
This isn't a "why keep the info private if you have nothing to hide" issue - it's about transparency and holding people accountable - and not just spammers. The requirement for valid info would go a good ways towards reducing the amount of spam, which benefits everyone.
Putting in valid contact info also means that a proxy can't hold your domain hostage if you want to transfer it. If it's worth nothing, there's no harm in putting in correct info, and if it's worth something, there's risk in putting in bogus info. Either way, it's one more party to go through, one more link in the chain that can screw up. Not worth the hassle to make your contact info private.
a lot of people use those proxy services in order to shield their personal data from their repressive governments in other countries. a proxy in u.s. will not give out data to random repressive country # 2318765, when they ask for the details of the dissenter that is running a blog. its very important for people who live in less civilized countries, for making a stand and changing things.
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