At 4/10/04 9:57 AM, Roger B.A. Klorese wrote: >And we contact the people responsible for domains how?
Depends why you want to contact them. I personally think that a public e-mail address (perhaps an auto-changing, spam-proof forwarding alias assigned by the registrar) should still be associated with each domain name, so you could always use that. If that doesn't work for you because you need an address or phone number: - If you're in law enforcement, you get the contact info via subpoena or other approved legal request, just like you get an address from a license plate. - If you need to contact them for technical/abuse reasons, you contact their ISP instead, using ARIN records or the like, as Ross suggested. This is what should be done anyway -- WHOIS has been useless for abuse issues for years. - If you have an intellectual property complaint and don't want to use the subpoena method, you just send the ISP a DMCA complaint and the site either goes away, or you find out the owner's contact info from the reply. It seems reasonable to me that domain names should be roughly about as private as car ownership: it's neither anonymous nor completely private (the police or an insurance company can get information about you, for example), but it's private enough for most people. The idea that domain name ownership should be 100% public is, to me, about as reasonable as suggesting that every car must have its owner's phone number and address painted on the side. I'm with Ross on the "turn 99% of it off" idea. That's not a bad slogan. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/ "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." -- Darwin
