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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

I respect ICANN for the most part but the publicity of WHOIS data is seriously awful. On one of my new domains, I made the mistake of forgetting to turn on WHOIS privacy. A couple days later I finally realized that I'd forgotten, after wondering why I was suddenly getting so many spam calls and emails. Two years later, I still occasionally get the spam... Every time I'm woken up by a robocall telling me about a $10000 business loan I die a little inside.

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Sadly ICANN isn't the only one that this is a problem with. Try registering on an gov small business sites, all that information is scrapped non stop. Because it's for contracting reasons you can't put in fluff either. It's a really messed up system.

the problem is not really having public data. it is that spammers are still largely unpunished!

No, public data IS a problem. I’d rather not have my home address on the Internet for anyone to see. I’d rather not mix my Internet and IRL identities. If I was living in the land of the free, and I had no whois protection, swatting me would be so easy.

again the problem is that swatting is easy.

or should I be able to swat you easily and without consequences if I happen to know a public tidbit about you, for example where you live?

Even better is if you register a trademark. Starting a year or two before it expires you start getting at least weekly junk mailings formatted to look like official government letters from entities like the "US Trademark Bureau Ltd." offering to assist you with the process of renewing for a small fee of several hundred to thousand dollars.

Fortunately most of them contain a prepaid envelope, so I get a small amount of enjoyment out of sending those back empty, or with the outer window envelope stuffed inside...

I rely on WHOIS data to contact sysops of delinquent sites, it is completely reasonable that somebody be available to at least attempt to contact.

If you don't like the spam, use Google apps/Gmail for your technical/administrative contacts.

It is fair and reasonable, if you are operating a domain, to be available for legitimate contact. I accept the small amount of money and time I spend receiving spam phone calls roughly once or twice a month, in exchange for the important notices and communications I receive (and can make) every couple.

It’s not about all or nothing – WHOIS data should make public an email that can be reached, and, if the requester identifies themselves, they should also be able to get more information to either directly contact or sue the owner.

But a random bot looking for victims it can spam shouldn’t be able to read all the WHOIS data.

> But a random bot looking for victims it can spam shouldn’t be able to read all the WHOIS data.

It is public information, and it is impossible to watermark. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the scraping of WHOIS data if it maintains any of its current usefulness.

DENIC (the folks who handle the German .de domain) doesn't expose owner and admin-c via whois anymore. If you want/need that information you have to use their web interface which sends the data over TLS, requires you to solve a captcha and implements rate-limiting.

And DENIC has protected the OWNER and TECH-C and ZONE-C for a while already.

I own a .de, a .eu and a .info

I get hundreds of spam mails per day for the .info, nothing for the other two.

It works.

> WHOIS data should make public an email

Technically, it's already in SOA record's RNAME field, which IMHO is a much saner option - given that whois is registry-dependent and doesn't even exist for some TLDs, and DNS is universal.

Well, no one can guarantee that it's working and mails will be read. Same as with whois data, of course.

Yeah the email and phone numbers in many of the WHOIS entries is absolutely useless.

Even for companies – PrivateInternetAccess’s phone number just is a robot saying "please send an email to the address listed in our WHOIS data" and hangs up.

This happened to me recently too. For some reason it seems .net domains are much worse than the others.

The number of calls and emails was just stupid.

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