An ICANN working group interim report to make Whois information generally unavailable to the general public is getting some coverage in non-domainer publications over the last couple of days
Basically the proposal calls for scrapping the current whois system which allows anyone to see who the owner of a domain is, (unless the owner has paid the registrar to have the registrar hold the domain under privacy) with a centralized Whois system called the Aggregated Registration Data Service (ARDS) which would store all domain ownership records but which would be closed by default to anyone other than those people or organizations who receive permission ton the basis that they have a legitimate need for the data.
It would make it almost impossible for John Q. Public to find out who the owner of a domain is which is definitely not good for domain investors who many times get contacted by people looking to buy their domain from the public whois record, even for domain names that are not “for sale”.
However presumable law enforcement who have access to all records.
From the Interim report:
“”A carefully selected subset of data elements would be made publicly accessible to anonymous requestors through a web interface to the RDS
Gated access would only be available to requestors who applied for and were issued credentials to be used for RDS query authentication.
The process by which credentials would be issued is not defined herein, but the EWG recommends that this process take into consideration each requestor’s purpose for wanting access to registration data.
Each gated access query would identify the authenticated requestor’s purpose (either explicitly or implicitly) and a desired list of data elements. Only data elements that were available for the domain name and accessible to the requestor for the declared purpose would be returned.”"
Beyond domain holders that many times get offers or interest on their domain names by interested parties finding their ownership information in the Whois records and other big loser would seem to be registrars that are charging an extra fee per domain for those that want their domain names held under privacy.
There are tens of millions of domain names held under “privacy”.
It should be noted this is an Interim not final report.
CIO.com called the plan “Extremely Disquieting;
“A working group for Internet regulators is under severe criticism for a proposal that would put an end to the openness of the current WHOIS system for domain name registration records.”
Krebsonsecurity.com, also expressed concern on the report saying:
The plan acknowledges that creating a “one-stop shop” for registration data also might well paint a giant target on the group for hackers, but it holds that such a system would nevertheless allow for greater accountability for validating registration data.…
