I'll actually offer my take: domain names under the US TLD are a shared, public good, and no one should be allowed to anonymously own a shared, public good.
I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.
fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys
I find it interesting how the view on this differs depending on country and what people are used to.
All of our personal identification data is available, not by design, but it is available
I think you're misinterpreting it as an obsession over privacy. We are victims of unscrupulous scam caller spam due to a multi tiered failure in how our government implements public utilities, and in the meantime we are chiseling at solutions such as enforcing rules on the data brokers who have our information for lease.
Which seems to be working, for people that pay for services to solve this problem. And California's government is simply doing that same service for free for its residents.
It wasn't all that long ago I could look up anybody in my town (or any town really) in a big book, and get contact details for them. Unless they specifically opt-out.
But now that concept is seen as madness.
Now companies no longer even list phone numbers or e-mail addresses on their own websites!
I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result.
Many of us find it unethical to give money to scalpers.
> a handful of .net domains that are under $100
And this is why.
Even if I was OK paying in principle, that's too much for a personal blog that gets one post every 4 years.
Did the same, the renewal failed because the card had expired, and now squatters have been sat on it, probably getting all my spam and resetting my credentials on random websites for the last 10 years.
In my opinion, there are still some really great short domains available. I actually even know some but don't have the budget to buy them.
The thing with domains is also that they aren't one time, I mean I am happy paying for domains which are 20$ say once even (and this comes as someone frugal but I just love domains) but most of these domains cost quite a lot.
For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.
> For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.
Well yes, that's exactly why we unfortunately need to pay rent for domains - otherwise speculators would just buy them all up even more than they already do.
Will WHOIS requests leak my address?
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention)
I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.
I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.
registrars have forwarded me ICANN notices about having info verification for 10 years and nothing happened
nothingburger
It's still fraud though. And there are multiple ways that might trigger an investigation into the validity of your contact info, such as abuse reports, court cases or failing to renew. Some people with axes to grind have been known to get domains of people they don't like taken down just by complaining to the registrar.
Can confirm.
I have a domain that's had outdated whois information since 2006. Nobody cares.
Even when it was up to date, it never got any spam, I suspect because the contact information was in a country that wasn't valuable to spammers.