Comment by transcriptase
2 years ago
The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash.
All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe.
And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.
This is about sunsetting the WHOIS protocol in favor of RDAP, not doing away with domain owner registration data.
It's crazy how many people just read the headline and choose to comment or upvote these links.
Also, why the title is not same as the article? It makes no sense.
To be fair, OP never said this was necessarily related directly to the article.
I’ll often post loosely related tangents like this because I would enjoy discussing the tangent with the HN crowd, but there’s often not a better opportunity to discuss it, so why not while we’re sort of on the topic anyway.
Ack that I don’t think it makes sense to discuss not even remotely related topics. But as long as it’s in the ballpark and it’s not going against other guidelines and leads to interesting discussion, I think it’s fine.
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The site tweaks some words out of titles
I can’t downvote. Not sure about others.
From the link:
RDAP offers several advantages over WHOIS including [...] the ability to provide differentiated access to registration data.
In other words, it provides the ability to monetize and extract more money from people. Like we need more of that...
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Tangentially - RDAP was created partially to resolve issues with PII in WHOIS
That was a common racket a long time ago, but pretty much every widely recommended registrar offers free whois privacy now. At least when they're allowed to, some TLDs forbid obfuscating the whois information.
For example, *.us domain registrars aren't allowed to privacy protect your domain: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/101qjbq/wow_never_b...
a little less than a year ago, my wife registered a .us domain that she ended up not using at all. she still gets phone calls nearly daily from people trying to sell her web design/dev work
Same with registry.in in India (for .in domains), where WHOIS privacy is not allowed as per the terms and conditions. [1]
[1]: https://www.registry.in/system/files/Terms_and_Conditions_fo...
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Wow! These policies are like 30 years behind. Exposing your phone number and address on WHOIS makes absolutely no sense in this day and age!
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I don't understand why people aren't using fake addresses for registering domains. I've had a few registered to 1001 Main St in my local town and a made up phone number for over 10 years now with no issue. Main Street will never be over 40 addresses for the foreseeable future and I can just update the record if need be.
So .us is more trustworthy than .com. Good to know.
Im one of those that think that developers are hiding too much, which makes things like vs code extension viruses rampant.
I wont force you to not be anonymous, but if you are going to run your software on my device I want some accountability. Our salaries should also reflect that.
Im sure that this will be unpopular though.
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"E-ZPass Outstanding Toll Notification
Dear User,Our system has identified an unpaid toll charge linked to your vehicle. To avoid additional fees or service disruptions, please settle this matter within 12 hours.
https://e-zpass.org-qrh.xin/indexshtml"
Best of luck trying to get an unknown Chinese registrar to stop their spam. My carrier does not even have a clue. My routers now block anything *.Xin. Anything and everything.
Apparently, Xin has not learned about hiding info: bj#xinnet.com (Change the # to an @ ). Some how someone lists it as "Elegant Leader Limited"
> but pretty much every widely recommended registrar offers free whois privacy now
If you go by the book e.g. Cloudflare not every field (e.g. state and country) is hidden. So not exactly.
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
More recently, yes. But the original (perhaps naive) goal was to keep domain owners accountable for whatever they were serving from hosts under their domains. That seems reasonable, at least on a more "polite" internet, where things weren't scraped and monetized and SEO'd into garbage.
The general purpose of publicly accessible registrant data is that people should be able to contact the owner of the domain in case of an issue, rather than the registry or registrar. "domain privacy" is simply the registrar putting themselves as the domain contact and becoming a forwarding service to you.
For large companies, and registrants under those ccTLD's that require local presence, it not uncommon that a legal firm acts like a proxy for the domain owner. This is a service that they take a few dollars for, and is in many ways similar to domain privacy.
The requirement of having the registrant as the contact person for a domain is something that (to my knowledge) comes from ICANN, and I think it has a positive effect. A domain should be owned and controlled by the registrant and not the registrar, which is then reflected in the contact information. In an alternate history we could see that the registrar (or even registry) owned the domain and only leased it to the registrant, in which case the registrant's power would be limited to other online services that people "buy" today.
You’re just using bad registrars.
https://porkbun.com/products/whois_privacy
Porkbun only came out in 2014
Two decades late on a problem
Oh the good ol days. $10/m for slow PHP shared hosting and $150 for an SSL certificate too.
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I've never had to pay Namecheap extra for WHOIS protection.
They always list it in the line items and in the renewal but whatever. In fact, it looks like I forgot to turn on auto-renew on their domain privacy product so it's sitting there in the 'grace' period. They work as a registrar so I use it.
It used to be more common back then
I was going to buy a domain back in my student days, but I stopped when I realised I didn't have a phone number. I used the public phone-box on the corner whenever I needed to actually call anyone. It was a little annoying to have to register a phone number when I didn't actually want anyone to call me.
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
The concept of most internet things has felt sleazy for many years. Right around the time that businesses started monetizing the internet is when that feeling really kicked off tbqh
I don't have the greatest registrar but hiding my info from whois is free
GDPR is what changed this. Before that, registrars had little incentive to hide it for free when they could instead charge you for the service. It was not trivial that Google Domains (rip) came with free privacy proxy right from the beginning.
It not so much that registrars had little incentives, but rather that GDPR defined the concept of legitimate interest as the definition for when registries should give out public information about domain ownership. That allows the contact information to still point to the correct domain owner without going through a proxy, while still creating a small hoop for parties interested to extract ownership information from the registry.
One can see this in practice in that company registration information is usually still available (through often behind a captcha), while personal information of private registrations require additional steps to demonstrate a legitimate interest. All this is also generally occurring at the registry level, rather than at the registrar.
It should be mentioned that privacy proxy is very similar to a straw man registration. If the registered owner is the proxy, then you are trusting that the proxy will honor the contract that is linking you with the property.
> GDPR
And yet all German sites must have such thing: https://0pointer.net/imprint
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Phone books went out to the city , the internet is full of every scammer from Bangalore to Bangladesh.
Strangely limited region of focus.
Well, traveling west
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> the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available
Your registrar is scamming you.
Note that it is being replaced with a different protocol, is there any indication that there are less stringent requirements on identity data disclosure on the new proto?
It's just a different protocol for how to send the data. It doesn't affect requirements on the data itself.
Often different protocols cover different data or data differently. Two protocols that have the same data would be quite redundant.
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Or you find one of the many registrars that offer free private whois, and none of these problems exist.
if you use a sleazy domain registrar, you get what you get. the good ones offer privacy for free.
For .pl TLD, due to GDPR, domain data is hidden by default for private individuals (as opposed to companies), yet some registrars still try to upsell the "domain privacy", hoping you don't know about it.
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I'm fine with the notion that corporations have to provide public information but not individuals.