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Comment by brown | Hacker News Reader

RDAP replaces WHOIS, offering a more technologically advanced way to discover the domain is protected by privacy services.

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Domain whois is useless, but IP whois is at least kind of useful to check before blanket banning entire IP ranges.

Interestingly, when discussing WHOIS with my networking students, I discovered .edu WHOIS is not (cannot?) hidden. I suppose EDUCAUSE either requires WHOIS to remain open or they do not offer information hiding.

Doing some WHOIS lookups, we found a point of contact at a university, called the network admin said hello and launched into an impromptu network admin interview. It was cool stuff. I emailed him later in the day to apologize to and thank him for being a good sport about the whole thing. He (fortunately) found it all rather enjoyable.

Some other TLDs, like .us and .in, also forbid WHOIS privacy. TLD owners are free to set whatever policy they want around this. Perhaps .edu does the same.

It's useful for checking if a domain name is taken without doing that through a registrar, which is both less convenient, and (in case of shitty registrars) can be sold to domain speculators.

Depends what endpoint you hit, the look up data will likely be sold regardless.

whois/rdap is very useful to identify if a domain is registered or not, and if so with whom. still lots of use there without pii data.

Both give you a way to find out the domain's registrar, registration date, transfer status, and administrative contacts like abuse@. Nameserver data can also be somehow useful.

Otherwise, what did you expect the registrar to divulge to you, a random passer-by?

As a random passer-by I can look up the registered ownership of any building on the street.

As an Australian, I can look up the ownership of random properties in the US for free. But if I want to do the same for a building on my own street, I have to pay a US$11 fee per a property searched.

The US has a reputation of being a hypercapitalist society, yet they seem to be behind Australia in the descent into hypercapitalism by not (yet) privatising the registration of land titles. [0]

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-12/$2.6-billion-price-ta...

Considering Australia (SA) invented the concept of the Torrens Title which means that we don't have to pay extra to protect a piece of paper, and that the Titles Office has always charged for access to titles, I don't think that this is the "hypercapitalism" hill to die on.

It also means that banks can't sell mortgages out from under their borrowers because all liens and other finanacial liabilities attached to a title are known.

Is that hypercapitalism or .. too much state control?

A private industry would be able to maintain the records for next to nothing by advertising or offering related services.

The govt could restrict themselves to ensuring no monopoly.

Intentionally ot not, it also prevents mass scraping.

It doesn’t because you can negotiate a bulk discount. If you want all the titles, they’ll sell that to you - for a huge fee, but still a big discount off paying for them all individually. So essentially it prevents mass scraping by individuals and small businesses, while posing no real obstacle for megacorps with megabudgets

I get the joke, but whois is super valuable for abuse report contact and for registrar and even ip block info!

Huge protocol for cybersecurity

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