Is it my imagination or is the largest registrar on the planet getting increasingly hostile to end users? Recently I had a customer who had some existing domain names that had been set to auto-renew with a credit card that this customer reported as stolen. Needless to say the names now went to PPC pages owned by this registrar, and showed up listed on their auction site. Same awful behavior as before, right?

Well this customer decided to pay the company with the famous well-endowed spokeswoman $80 to re-claim one of their domains from purgatory, otherwise known as pending-delete status. But the others have remained in that status (and listed on the auction site and generating tiny PPC revenue) for two and a half months already.

Are they trying to kill off the drop services by clinging onto names for the year following expire dates? Were not enough people offended by denied transfers for 60 days after any slight change to the WHOIS record? This soon to be going public company has a huge market share, and acts the part of a bully too. A cursory look about newsgroups shows a rising level of frustration by many of their customers.

So 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.