WHOIS faces the axe

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A growing group of net privacy advocates is presurring Internet overseer ICANN into scrapping WHOIS, the web's domain-name 'phone book'.

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That's going to be a right pain

I mean fair enough I can see where this "group" of net privacy people are coming from because when I had my domain registered and setup, you could see my full postal address and information on the whois page including postal codes etc.

This took me 3 weeks to get removed while the registrar sent a letter with a unique ID code in it to my address, which I then inserted into their website and then this took about 3 days to filter through.

some top-level domains already allow you to opt-out of whois

but it can be infinitely useful in some cases

I think they should limit the information shown, definately.

That will be a really pain in the arse. I use whois for many things such has finding contacts for little ****s and their haxoring websites, or to find contacts for people who are sitting on domain names trying to make a profit.

Here is also a good example, I rent a games server and the company went bust and shut it down without any email or any other way of contacting the owner. Jump on the whois and there are the details I need to contact him.

I think whois should go the other way, more detail on the list for .co.uk .net etc. I would probably pay a small fee every year for the use of the list.

For many people, there is little or no difference between a company and a web site

In some cases, web sites are very coy about sharing their 'true' contact details

When you go to companies house - you can check all of the details that you need to check about a company - and lots of the basic info is free of charge...

...it makes perfect sense to be able to get the same details for a web site and its ownership

While respecting the rights of an individual, I don't want to live in a world where people can easily mask the ownership of sites - and it is impossible to 'flip' an IP

Being able to do things with less than 100% anonymity brings a sense of responsibility

Preventing spammers is something else - but there are so many ways to add someone to a spam list and 'assault them', that I am not certain that this will work

If 'they' are looking to prevent personal data acquisition on WHOIS by 'bots' - then maybe 'they' can alter the system to give the data in a GIF format rather than 'usable' text

A lot of people are using proxy companies to register domains anyway and as such trying to find the details of whether it is legit or not is getting harder and harder.

The only real people that have things to hide such as their name on the whois information are generally spammers or those nasty people that register the mis-spellings of well known domains and park advertising and pop-up advertising pages on these.

I guess the answer would be some kind of independent, 100%-whiter-than-white agency that was fast, efficient and responsive - together with a fistful of solid anti-spamer legislation - but who would fund it and/or fight for it to be 'built' ?

dont know why you are making all this who ha, ICANN is quite frankly crud and never does anything....

you can already hide your details by opting out with .co.uk anyway.