4 ms·

Ask HN: How to develop transaprency in WHOIS?

11 points by samstave 6y ago

Personally, maybeMaybeMaybe industrially(?); Whois, not only for domains, but also for reversphone lookup - is more than broken, it is REALLY bad. Any advice?

joshxyz 6y ago
Thats high risk. Registrars like Namecheap even provide whois privacy for free now, and it's peaceful for our inboxes.
stakkur 6y ago
WHOIS information should be private by default, at no additional cost.
pshc 6y ago
Could you elaborate what you mean by broken? I like private registration myself. IMO they should just do away with the address fields, in this age of doxxing and swatting.
duskwuff 6y ago
You can't, and shouldn't. We already had domain registration "transparency" in the early/mid 2000s, when domain privacy was a rare and costly service. It was awful. Anyone who registered a domain would immediately start receiving a bunch of junk mail (like, physical letters) about it, along with a bunch of email spam -- and any registrant with significant privacy concerns was basically out of luck. By 2010 or so, most registrars offered domain privacy as an add-on, or even for free, but the passage of GDPR sealed the deal -- public WHOIS is fundamentally incompatible with the GDPR. Most of the major registries (including, AFAIK, all gTLDs) have enforced contact privacy for all domains, and there is no way you're going to get bulk access to the real data, especially if your goal is to make it available to others.
- rovr138 6y ago
  > It was awful. Anyone who registered a domain would immediately start receiving a bunch of junk mail (like, physical letters) about it, along with a bunch of email spam -- So much physical SPAM and SEO emails. I’m grateful for privacy whois services. Only primary domain for the company has public info.
JustARandomGuy 6y ago
We had transparency in domains names in the 90s and 2000s and it was terrible. Far too many scam calls, letters and emails came in to the registered addresses. Frankly I would support not including physical postal addressses and phone numbers, and only including email addresses on domain registrations. If you want accurate WHOIS for domains and phones you need to outline a way to prevent abuse because nobody wants to go back to the way it was before. Heck I’m being harassed right now by someone who wants to buy my domain and I’m super glad all they have is my Cloudflare obscured email. (Can I say how much I love Cloudflare Registrar? Not affiliated but a very happy customer)

11 points by samstave 6y ago

Personally, maybeMaybeMaybe industrially(?); Whois, not only for domains, but also for reversphone lookup - is more than broken, it is REALLY bad. Any advice?

joshxyz 6y ago

Thats high risk. Registrars like Namecheap even provide whois privacy for free now, and it's peaceful for our inboxes.

stakkur 6y ago

WHOIS information should be private by default, at no additional cost.

pshc 6y ago

Could you elaborate what you mean by broken? I like private registration myself. IMO they should just do away with the address fields, in this age of doxxing and swatting.

duskwuff 6y ago

You can't, and shouldn't. We already had domain registration "transparency" in the early/mid 2000s, when domain privacy was a rare and costly service. It was awful. Anyone who registered a domain would immediately start receiving a bunch of junk mail (like, physical letters) about it, along with a bunch of email spam -- and any registrant with significant privacy concerns was basically out of luck. By 2010 or so, most registrars offered domain privacy as an add-on, or even for free, but the passage of GDPR sealed the deal -- public WHOIS is fundamentally incompatible with the GDPR. Most of the major registries (including, AFAIK, all gTLDs) have enforced contact privacy for all domains, and there is no way you're going to get bulk access to the real data, especially if your goal is to make it available to others.

rovr138 6y ago
> It was awful. Anyone who registered a domain would immediately start receiving a bunch of junk mail (like, physical letters) about it, along with a bunch of email spam -- So much physical SPAM and SEO emails. I’m grateful for privacy whois services. Only primary domain for the company has public info.

JustARandomGuy 6y ago

We had transparency in domains names in the 90s and 2000s and it was terrible. Far too many scam calls, letters and emails came in to the registered addresses. Frankly I would support not including physical postal addressses and phone numbers, and only including email addresses on domain registrations. If you want accurate WHOIS for domains and phones you need to outline a way to prevent abuse because nobody wants to go back to the way it was before. Heck I’m being harassed right now by someone who wants to buy my domain and I’m super glad all they have is my Cloudflare obscured email. (Can I say how much I love Cloudflare Registrar? Not affiliated but a very happy customer)