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Comment by chris_overseas | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain in more detail why they aren't able why they aren't able to cover certain TLDs (including several falling under GDPR in the EU)? Their FAQ says: "Due to registry restrictions, WhoisGuard cannot be used with .asia, .ca, .cn, .uk, .co.uk, .de, .eu, .in, .id, .me, .uk, .nu, .li, .ch, .fr, .sg, .com.sg, .org.uk, .us, .es, .com.es, .nom.es, .org.es, .com.au, .net.au, .paris, .vote, .voto, .xn--3ds443g, .nyc, or .org.au domains."

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DENIC (.de) has had it’s own policy including their own form of protection for a long time.

Currently you can query for generic data and an abuse email address but the contact details are only revealed if you are the domain holder or have a solid reason[1].

> In all other cases, DENIC will generally not provide information. Instead, if you think that the contents of a website that can be accessed via a domain may be illegal, you should send an e-mail reporting the matter to the e-mail address for abuse reports (Abuse). You find the e-mail address on the domain query page. Moreover, the imprint, if any, of the website concerned will inform you who is the operator of the website.

To add some additional context, a proper, up-to-date imprint, including a postal address (no P.O.) and in most cases a phone number, is legally required for practically every website in Germany

[1] https://www.denic.de/en/service/whois-service/third-party-re...

I've talked with someone on IRC about this, and apparently they do give out the email rather easily (without being law enforcement, abuse stuff, etc), so there's still some possibility to contact the domain owner even if there's no website running.

It's also worth noting .de don't allow foreigners to own their domains, in opposition of most other nation tdls. I won't considered them as an example.

That‘s interesting, I didn‘t know that. Fully agree that they are not a good example. My last paragraph was to explain how pointless this privacy theater is anyway, considering that every website owner is required to give out much more info in the imprint.

Yes, you need to submit German driver license, German utility bills, and things in the like. We were working on localizing one French website to a German version, and just ended using .eu as the German site.

This makes me sad. I don‘t think I had ever had to do this but I always used a German postal address and German bank account. Also my last .de domain registration is a few years ago, so maybe they handle this stricter now.

Anyway, if you have any questions regarding domain registration in Germany or which registrars worked well for me, feel free to contact me, my details are in my profile.

Sure, thanks for your proposal, appreciate it, we won't probably do business in Germany anytime soon though.

I have registered a .de for a Finnish company. No problem at all via gandi.net. It would be weird if an EU country could limit registration like that. .no I believe is restricted, but not an EU country.

Not sure about the others, but if you do a whois on a .ca domain you will see it already returns a proxy address (Canadian Internet Registration Authority). You have to provide a valid Canadian address to register a .ca, but they'll only give that information to law enforcement.

This applies to .co.uk domains too.

Only recently -- probably in response to the GDPR.

I was showing a non-technical colleague only two weeks ago how doing a whois query on our company's .co.uk domain showed our company address and the individual responsible for registration. I just checked again now and pretty much all the useful info has gone.

.NYC requires that the owner have a physical presence in New York City. In addition to the standard whois owner/tech/billing/etc contact sections, .NYC requires a "Nexus" contact -- basically, a NYC-based address of either a person or business affiliated with the domain.

See http://www.ownit.nyc/faq, under "WILL PROXY REGISTRATIONS, SOMETIMES CALLED “DOMAIN PRIVACY” BE ALLOWED ON MY .NYC DOMAIN NAME?"

Basically, it's the registrar's policy to prohibit obfuscating the actual domain owner. Resellers like Namecheap have to abide by these policies.

I can't speak for EU domains, or for the reasoning behind the .NYC policy.

It's what it says, for some extensions, whois information is managed by the registry. Namecheap is legally obliged to provide the registrant information to the registry and they publish the whois information.

The same restriction also applies to other name registrars like Gandi: https://wiki.gandi.net/en/domains/private-registration

In the case of most of those, it's simply unnecessary. For instance, for EU ccTLDs, none of them reveal anything more than the most basic information in Whois for private individuals owing to the DPD (and its successor, the GDPR). For others, as people have noted, you need to prove residency. This is pretty common with ccTLDs who aren't subject to ICANN regulation, even outside of the EU.

I can't recall the .vote/.voto policies (haven't work for a registrar in a year), nor those for .asia.

It wasn't necessary when I registered a .uk domain ~3 years ago; you could just set your email etc to be private with Nominet (the UK registry).

Every registry has some leeway to set its own policies, and especially ccTLD registries, which aren't even contracted parties with ICANN.

Most of those listed TLDs likely have requirements about who can register domains on that TLD, so they need that info for verification purposes. That doesn't mean that they're publishing it in WHOIS though; many are not.

.ie is usually only handed out by Irish registrars.

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