WHOIS
“A DOMAIN
OWNER WILL USE A MIDDLEMAN, NORMALLY A PROXY SERVICE, INSTRUCTING THE LATTER TO SUBMIT ITS OWN WHOIS CONTACT INFORMATION.”
can be essential for fi nding out who the current owner is and how to track him or her down. Even when a domain has never had an available public whois record, you can oſt en work out its ownership by other means, such as reversing the IP address to give you other domains hosted on the same resource and triangulating from there.
How many domains are registered under whois privacy?
personal contact information, a domain owner will use a middleman, normally a proxy service, instructing the latter to submit its own whois contact information.
Why do whois privacy services exist?
Whois data show who owns what on the Internet. T is has obvious advantages, from being able to contact people to enforcing rights. But one of the overarching memes in today’s Internet regards who controls an individual’s data. It can be argued that making a person’s contact information publicly available is tantamount to an invasion of privacy. Enter whois privacy.
Many people associate whois privacy with scammers and spammers. Are there legitimate uses of these services?
Many organisations do not want their contact details posted for the world to see, especially if there is any history of aggressive or violent behaviour against that institution. Also, any mention of a database or email addresses and
www.worldipreview.com
phone numbers will be seen as an opportunity by spammers. By opting for whois privacy, a domain owner removes the ability for anyone to randomly email it asking to acquire the domain, or spam it with junk email.
Additionally, a company that wants to register domain names for future product releases but doesn’t want to tip off competitors or researchers about those plans, might opt for a privacy service. Certainly it seems that every time Apple or Amazon registers a new domain name there is someone writing about it within hours and speculating about what it means.
Can whois privacy be defeated, if someone is motivated to do so?
Whois history is the easiest way of defeating whois privacy, assuming that the domain has not always been privacy protected. DomainTools has more than 10 years of historical whois records, and oſt en the data in the ‘real’ records that existed before the advent of the privacy service
DomainTools completed a study of whois privacy in November 2012, and found nearly 15 percent of all domain whois records to be under privacy protection. It was also interesting to note how concentrated the whois privacy presence is at certain registrars. T e numbers are muddied a bit owing to some registrars off ering whois privacy service for free as a default option in registration. But at 15 percent of almost 250 million domains, whois privacy is clearly an important service to a very large number of domain owners.
What are the latest whois protocol discussions at ICANN?
Whois has always been a hot topic at ICANN owing to the sensitivity of the material. Some want complete, unaltered verifi ed data and some want total anonymity.
T e recent ICANN board resolution (November 2012) for assessing whois clearly supports the need to address whois policy—what is required, why it is required and who can have access. T ese resolutions are an important fi rst step in creating policy. More specifi cally, there is currently a policy discussion focused on technical requirements of whois and its supporting architecture. T ere is also a separate working group focused on whether thick whois is required for all existing (including .com and .net) and new gTLDs. T e new ICANN board resolution will encourage increased focus and debate on these and other whois policy initiatives.
Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 1, Issue 4 45
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