Re: WHOIS accuracy, and name deletions

[Derek J. Balling]

On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 05:32  PM, Robert L Mathews wrote:

- that nowadays, people who hold domains are unlikely to run the services
for them or feel responsible to the community -- or if they do run the
services and there's a problem with that domain, they are probably the
cause of that problem, so there's little point in complaining to them;

Errr, I'm not sure I understand the logic of this argument. If "I" as the domain-holder am the cause of an accidental mailbomb, why SHOULDN'T $victim have easy access to my contact info so that I can get it corrected on my end?

- that anyone who is actually a "bad guy" is likely to provide bad data
  anyway, and that if the policy changes to drop domains with obviously
  invalid WHOIS data like "Mickey Mouse", it's trivially easy to start
  providing false data that doesn't appear blatantly bad;

True. But I don't think that makes "accurate data" any less a "best practice".

- that when my customers first become aware of the fact that their
information is publicly available, almost all of them are appalled,
and a few have even canceled their registrations as a result (in one
extreme case, a customer was a witness to a murder who had kept his
address secret for years for fear of retaliation, then happened to find
it was available to anyone with a Web browser after registering his
domain name);

Provide this as a service to your users. Register the domains in your name, etc. etc. I think someone on this list even offers this type of service in a "generic" sense, if I remember correctly from the last time this thread came up. :)

- that since the gross privacy violations of public WHOIS far outweigh
the benefits, public WHOIS should therefore be completely abolished,
with WHOIS data available only to people who actually need it
(registrars, law enforcement, etc.), much like driver's license
records are now only available to insurance companies, law enforcement,
and so forth.

It's not a privacy violation if you have no expectation of privacy. Use of a domain is the same to my mind as the ownership of land. Just like I can walk into the county clerk's office and pull the land-ownership records for a parcel of land, I see nothing functionally different between that and "pulling the virtual land-ownership record of the domain next door".

Before you make the "ease of access" argument, remember that many town/county clerks are putting their data online, and it's only a matter of time before most/all of that data is available as easily as WHOIS data is.

I'm not going to dispute that there are varying opinions on this, so I don't want Robert to think I'm picking on him or anything, but just as there are counter-arguments to the points I've made, there are also counter-arguments to some of his. ;-)

D