Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
Why? I own a small site with a non-existant readership. I do little doodles and post them there ("webcomic" would be insulting to the people that actually write comics). It doesn't sell anything, is totally divorced from the real universe in both setting and characters, and exists purely for fun. If you want to get in touch there is an email address in the About page, or the WHOIS data will tell you who the web host is, and they'll pass it on to me. Adding personal info that the WHOIS requests like name, address and telephone number would add absolutely nothing to the website, and would just splash my personal data all over the web regardless of the fact that people can contact me without it anyway. If there was ever a legal situation where I refused to reveal my identity then the hosting company has all of that.
To me, your suggestion is like saying *anyone* posting *anything* on the web should stand up publicly and reveal personal info. It's pointless, and just exposes personal data apparently for the hell of it. Would you fancy adding your name, address and telephone number to your Slashdot account?
It also doesn't solve the problem that providing fake information to domain registrars is a felony in the US and probably a couple more countries. In fact, if you commit a felony that is somehow connected to a domain with fake registration information, your sentence is automatically increased by 7 years or doubled whichever is less.
I'm not sure I would recommend doing that. And if your in a country where it isn't illegal, then make sure the registrar isn't or it could suck you into the law there. I'm not sure they would extradite you or anything, but a warrant could sneak up on you down the road when attempting to get a better job or visiting certain countries or if the cops in your own country get a boner for you and want to use it as an excuse to take you down town once a year and hold you for several days seeing if anyone wants to extradite you. I was once held for 3 days on 4 or 5 unpaid parking tickets from 10 years prior that happens 5 months after I sold the car.
I copied this idea from Microsoft.com and put: Administrator, Domain
as my name for my small business site.
Sometimes I even get physical mail with "Dear Mr Domain Administrator..."
I think "Heroes" pointed this situation out quite well when Hiro and Anjo turned up on online stripper Nikki's doorstep after reading the whois information for her domain. You don't always want people to be able to find your physical address.
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.