Is WHOIS going to go away?

Sat Apr 21 20:35:29 UTC 2018

On April 20, 2018 at 20:36 nanog at nanog.org (Aaron C. de Bruyn via NANOG) wrote:
 > On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 12:53 PM Keith Medcalf <kmedcalf at dessus.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > This last statement is entirely untrue.  WHOIS provides information as to
 > > the PUBLISHER (such as one would find on the masthead of a newspaper).
 > > This is, ought to be, and should remain, public information.
 > >
 > 
 > Oh, so I'm a newspaper now?  Or are you telling me there's some magical
 > setting in media publishing that prevents someone from hitting 'print'
 > without attaching an identifying masthead?

To a great extent the current situation has evolved due to the
evolution of inexpensive always-on internet links and the rise of
hosting companies.

Prior to this one might pick up a vanity domain but for most
individuals having an actual, functioning web site was prohibitively
expensive.

This situation was why we first had the rise of services like
wordpress and myspace, and for that matter flickr and pinterest etc,
where one could host their relatively non-commercial activity (or very
tiny commercial activity, their garage band etc) for almost no cost.

Facebook still caters to that -- non-domain siting (pages, groups) ,
but at this point for other reasons namely their own large
ecosystem. But by and large it also arose from the same basic business
model.

It wasn't the domain per se so much as the always available
hosting. Similar can be said for a lot of "the cloud".

But domains pointing at personal web sites or even just email still
have their appeal, clearly, around 300M have been sold.

This wasn't a problem previously because commercial interests were
required by law (in most countries) to provide clear contact info
anyhow, and why wouldn't they unless they were dishonest or very
unusual.

But now that they have managed to sell many millions of cheap domains
to non-commercial interests the issue of "privacy" arises almost
entirely from that trend.

But crippling WHOIS won't achieve privacy. If anyone believes that
isn't true show me the warranty.

At best it will just raise the barrier of entry to your "privacy" a
little.

And one breach and it's gone anyhow.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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