Is WHOIS going to go away?

Thu Apr 19 22:24:14 UTC 2018

“Granted there's
that gray area of dissident political movements etc. but their full
time job is protecting their identity.”

You think? The median number of domain name registration that used privacy proxy service in the Middle East is 24%. See the DNS Market study: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/meac-dns-study-26feb16-en.pdf

Now lets look at the distribution of that number: “Rates of privacy proxy registrations varied across countries in the region, with the lowest rates seen in Iran (7%) and Turkey (12%), and the highest rates in Syria (32%), Algeria and Egypt (31% each).” I guess some people who share your band name in those countries with the lowest percentage of privacy proxy service might not really know how they can use privacy proxy services ! Lets just keep their personal information public until they find out how and why their house has been raided.

Also I don’t really understand why people keep saying “whois is going away” and “whois is going dark”

It is not. Personal information in the database should be made private. WHOIS contains more than personal information. You are the technical people,  you know better than me.

Thanks for bringing up the grey area anyway. Not many consider that in the discussions. But it’s not only dissidents. It’s also journalists and especially female journalists that work on issues that some might not like. Also sometimes you don’t even know you have to hide your identity because you don’t think you are doing anything against the  law, the problem is that we don’t have the rule of law everywhere in the world.

Best

Dr. Farzaneh Badiei
Research Associate, School of Public Policy
Executive Director, Internet Governance Project

From: bzs at theworld.com<mailto:bzs at theworld.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2018 5:58 PM
To: Aaron C. de Bruyn<mailto:aaron at heyaaron.com>
Cc: nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>; Rich Kulawiec<mailto:rsk at gsp.org>
Subject: Re: Is WHOIS going to go away?

One of the memes driving this WHOIS change is the old idea of
"starving the beast".

People involved in policy discussions complain that "spammers" -- many
only marginally fit that term other than by the strictest
interpretation -- use the public WHOIS data to contact domain owners.

I've countered that 20+ years experience trying to "starve the beast"
by trying to deny them access to email and other casual contact info
has proven the approach to be useless.

Choosing the privacy options on your domain registration is probably
just as, if not more, effective.

Another argument against this whole idea is that in most countries one
is required by law to provide valid contact information if they are
doing business with the general public. That would include soliciting
donations etc.

And that's essentially why domains exist, organizational contact.

This trend towards "vanity" domains is relatively recent and really
the only reason one can even claim there is a problem.
I doubt Microsoft or General Motors are excited to see that their
domain registration contact information will soon be protected by law.

--
        -Barry Shein

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