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Comment by tyrust | Hacker News Reader

>I think it is a good thing that every domain has valid contact info.

Does your "valid" include domain registrars that provide WHOIS protection that includes forwarding messages to the protected owner?

And, honest question, why do you think that domains should have contact info?

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When I used to work in security, I used Whois every day. In many cases it was to notify a domain owner that their domain had been compromised and was being used for spam. I also used it a lot to track down bad actors because most of them are dumb and don’t hide their Whois.

In germany there is an imprint requirement so you'll always have a contact point for these things.

Unlike WHOIS it's on a website so you can protect this information much more easily from scraping and spamming.

That's where WHOIS protection comes in handy. If you don't want to get even more spam (the imprint has to be clear text, no obfuscation so gets spammed a lot) but a website that could target Germans (or you're in Germany), you'll quickly get costly letters from specialised lawyers. Having Whois protection usually helps, they tend to give up if they can't get your address easily.

Some minor Obfuscation should be okay "mail at example dot com" => "mail@example.com" and similar.

Plus I'm fairly certain providing temporary mail addresses (with decent lifetime) would also be okay.

Specialised Lawyer isn't quite right, a business that competes with you needs to file a complaint (IIRC from law course).

No, minor obfuscation is not ok. The same as a picture can be a problem for blind people, your example can be an issue for people not speaking english (it's a German law). I wouldn't take any risks with these laws.

My sites are all dual-language so I don't see that as a problem.

Not all domains have public websites.

If those create any abuse then you can still contact the registrar.

From what I understand the eventual plan for WHOIS to only allow access if there is truly legitimate interest. Everything else can be filtered over the registrar.

off the top of my head, valid DMCA takedowns?

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