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Nominet Compromising UK WHOIS Privacy, Wants To See Gov't-Issued ID
ktetch-pirate (1850548) writes Earlier this week, Nominet launched the .uk domain to great fanfare, but hidden in that activity has been Nominet's new policy of exposing personal domain owners' home addresses. Justification is based on a site being judged "commercial," which can mean anything from a few Google ads or an Amazon widget, to an email subscription box or linking to too many commercial sites, according to Nominet reps. In the meantime though, they want your driving license or passport to ensure "accuracy" because they "want to make things safe."
>UK story
Think of the children!
Oh, won't someone please think of the children!
Operation Just Cause. I Never Trust Phake-Registry Sites. Go With .name If You Want To Hide In Your Shell Rudy.
I wonder how much this has to do with an attempt to comply with statutes against anonymous Internet businesses. Do these statutes have a reasonably rich body of case law yet?
Few will change domains over this.
There's more push now for real identities when signing up for youtube, gmail, yahoo mail, and many other online services. That trend is only going to continue as it becomes more and more important to be able to verify people's identities online.
Like it or not, that WILL happen. The original "nerd playground" of the internet is used by everyone now, and with that comes a lot of new responsibilities, laws, and regulations. I don't think it's possible to stop that trend because there is too much social force and will behind it. We don't let people drive cars anonymously without a license that tells exactly who you are and where you live. And in this case it's up to the private companies: they don't HAVE to give you service so if they want to require proof of r/l identity that is their right. You can opt out of that by not using their services.
mine address is in whois for every domain I own; sure there are a couple major shoddy registrars that will put in their address instead of yours for your domains but they completely suck for other reasons.
You can opt out of that by not using their services.
The government requires people to either A. purchase specific goods and services from private companies or B. go to prison. Indecent exposure laws require purchase of clothing. Vagrancy laws require owning or leasing a home. And universal healthcare laws require either buying private health insurance or making less than the poverty line.
Has the price of preteens skyrocketed in Brazil the last few months? Something to do with the Olympics?
Will the same private registration tricks that work here in The States (Like Domains By Proxy) work over in the UK too?
They always looked to have avoided the commercialisation of other country/international DNS services, but having known someone who crawled their way into the hierarchy with little knowledge of the system but an excellent politician, I learned that really they're just the same as any Verizon but with less honesty about how they operate.
This aside, the Nominet position has always been to require honest data but to allow people operating non-commercially to hide their information from whois. On the latter, frankly if you add Google Ads to your site then you ARE a commercial concern - the Internet doesn't get to redefine what type of moneymaking counts as moneymaking. On the former, again, it's about honesty: if you're going to allow people to register anonymously, state this, and show the steps you take to make it hard for your customers to be identified. Otherwise only the dishonest will register under false identities, while those trying to be hidden for legitimate reasons (e.g. political) will end up being easy to discover anyway.
Right. The European Union has completely different privacy rules for individuals and businesses. For individuals, there's the European Privacy Directive, which gives Europeans much stronger privacy rights than in the US. For businesses, it's completely different. Online businesses face the European Electronic Commerce Directive, and have to disclose who's behind the business.
That's deliberate EU policy. The whole point of the single European market is to make it easy to buy and sell across national boundaries within the EU. So there are lots of EU rules which benefit consumers and prevent businesses from operating in the country with the weakest regulation.
The .us domain registrar doesn't allow anonymous registration, either. Actually, neither does ICANN. The registrant listed in Whois owns the domain. If that's some "private registration" front, they own the domain. This became a big deal when RegisterFly tanked and people with "private registration" discovered they really didn't own domains they thought were theirs. That took months to straighten out.
Every single domain should have accurate and verifiable information for the owner, administrative, and technical contacts. The use of services which anonymize or mask domain owners should be prohibited.Whois was intended to enable you to identify the ownership of a domain and who to contact about it.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
I have neither a UK driving license (voluntarily surrendered some years ago) nor a valid passport - what am I to do, given that government issued photo ID is NOT compulsory here!
TFA is kind of long, so I will concede that on this one occasion, I may have merely skimmed it's content. However, as a gesture of good-will, I shall read the *next* TFA in it's entirety, *twice*.
Anyway, from my brief skimmage, I could find no mention of passports or driving licences. Does anyone know what the summary is referring to?
....for me not being able to go to a web site and use a vehicle number plate to look up the address of the jerk who cut me up in traffic today.
Similar reasons surely need to apply to domain registrations.
Says the Anonymous Coward...
... everyone who is against this, is also against publishing the names and addresses of political donors, right?
They will have their name changed by the people who favor their right to privacy to Nomonet, whether they see it happening or not. See Ya
To disclose personal information without the giver's permission or to change its use is a breach of the UK Data Protection Act. Given that their "it's a company" assessment does not need to track with reality, it's just a matter of time before they catch a live one and need to face the music. A classic example is the Stephen Fry who they herald as "first to make the switch" himself - his work is commercial, but the website date may be personal and as such subject to DPA.
Give it time, the digging has already started.