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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.

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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.

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