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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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