Network Solutions to Sell WHOIS Ads

Wired 2000 writes "A news article on InternetNews reports that Network Solutions plans to sell ad space on the WHOIS database, which raises the question whether NSI is allowed to profit off a database which they no longer own, particularly the highly trafficked WHOIS database. "

Comments

Re:Heard of phone books?

[alhaz]

The problem here is that you're dead wrong.

The telco will slap you with a lawsuit so fast it'll make your head spin if you duplicat a phone book, or use it to build your own list for business purposes.

Companies such as telesurveying organizations sometimes end up using photocopied telephone book pages, but only with a waiver from the client stating that the client is liable and not the surveying org.

I got lectured to about this while in my indenture at Western Wats, years ago when i was just out of highschool, flat broke, and $5.50/hr sounded pretty good.

The companies that make these CDs with huge telephone directories go to great lengths to compile phone lists from other sources, and document those sources.

Case in point: My mother has never, ever had a telephone number in her own name, but is listed in nearly every one of those cd-rom databases, on some of them not only in Utah but also in New York and Hawaii at the numbers the family once occupied in those states.

True, the telco does sell advertising space on the cover and in the back of the phone book, but they don't make you sit through a promotional message with every 411 call, do they?

Just the web page!

[fougasse]

They're only planning to advertise, via banner ads, on their whois web gateway.

I don't see anything wrong with that. Whois isn't a web service, it's a service that uses the whois protocol. NSI has a gateway to it up on their page, and seeing as NSI has a quasi-monopoly on domain registration, it's a very popular page. But anyone else can create a gateway to whois just as easily, and tons of people have - for instance just about every web hosting company which registers domain names. Many other whois gateways on the web already have ads, and there shouldn't be a different policy for NSI's.

Of course, if they start limiting direct whois access or placing text ads on results, that's another story. From everything I've read, though, they're not planning to do that.

You're not quite understanding this . . .

[Kozz]

What's the big deal? They want to sell ads on the webpage, not within the whois database itself.

"There are thousand of locations who link to Whois and all have the option of selling ads on those pages. To preclude NSI from doing this would be unfair and could be viewed as a restraint of trade."

If you're using whois from the command line, you will likely not see those animated GIF banner ads, am I right?
So now let me ask you again -- do you really care?