Is WHOIS going to go away?

Fri Apr 20 03:44:10 UTC 2018

On April 20, 2018 at 02:58 aaron at heyaaron.com (Aaron C. de Bruyn) wrote:
 > On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 5:20 PM <bzs at theworld.com> wrote:
 > 
 >     So you think restricting WHOIS access will protect dissidents from
 >     abusive governments?
 > 
 > 
 > Every government has subpoena power.  Some of them even have the power to beat
 > people with a rubber hose in the back room until they get the information they
 > want.
 > 
 > Being able to put bogus data into whois won't prevent the government from
 > finding you, but it may prevent crazies from showing up at my house, or even
 > knowing that I run a particular site.

That's part of the contradiction in all this vis a vis ICANN.

ICANN has had a push for years to improve the accuracy (and I assume
precision) of domain registration information and therefore WHOIS.

I know because I've sat in on any number of ICANN meetings with slides
and talks about how frequently domains are registered to "Donald Duck"
or similar.

The numbers vary from report to report but I remember numbers like
over 25% of registrations seemed to be prima facie bogus like that.

So they developed that letter you get if you have a domain registered
which says check your domain reg information and fix it because if
it's not accurate (and precise) you risk losing your domain.

And required registrars to send you that letter periodically typically
around 30-60 days before renewal.

Which means by pushing on the problem of domain name registration
information accuracy they also made it much more difficult for people
who may've had a good reason to not enter accurate (and/or precise)
information.

But we also got privacy options from registrars and third-parties.

So the net result maybe isn't all that terrible unless you have a good
reason to hide your information even from your registrar (and ICANN),
checking a privacy option won't accomplish that, they still have your
info they're just not revealing it via WHOIS.

ANYHOW this is too long and boring already, I'm not sure I can even
stand to proofread it, but it's all a rather tangled story which
probably amounts to: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And some pretty bad intentions also.

 > 
 > -A

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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