WHOIS should tell you just that
Posted in ICANN, WHOIS on July 3rd, 2006So much hoopla over proposed changes to WHOIS records. Spammers have sent bots out to harvest email addresses from the public records for years now. But there are many benefits to open records that outweigh the alledged benefits of a tiered access system of recordkeeping.
Even worse than bots colecting email addresses, I noticed a few years back that when I transferred domains away from Network Solutions I suddenly got a HUGE spike in junk mail. The relationship was easy to deduce since I used dedicated email addresses to register names there (registrarName@myDomain.) Cause and effect or incredible coincidence?
In the realm of real property public access to ownership information is considered important, so I’m not sure why it should be any different for domain names. People that want to hide property ownership behind a corporate veil can do so, just as people can use inexpensive “private’ registrations to have some other company name show up on the WHOIS record.
