The Aus approach was indeed taken due to spam considerations, trying to limit data mining of whois records (the daily rate limiting), and renewal scams based upon listed expiry dates (I remember reading through auDA doco as it came into being after Melbourne IT lost the exclusive gig). I definitely get more crap from my .com regos, even those with anonymised WHOIS entries, than I do the .au's I manage (at least those that flog specifically to the business around the domains). Not to say I agree with auDA on everything - the upcoming opening of the .au 2LD to willy-nilly registrations feels like a poor decision to me... just inventing more "land" for which folks will have to compete... but I guess that's the nature of a digital economy, and I'm beginning to digress....
Back on track... I think we're seeing the eventual death of WHOIS, due to GDPR. A double edged sword - I mean, on one hand, it's waaaaay too easy to scrape and then have third party companies take copies, charging a subscription to suppress the information (has a feel of extortion). On the other hand, when helping folks sort out their issues, sometimes they don't even know who their registrar is, let alone who's the authorised contact and where their correspondence is being sent.. Hopefully there'll at least be a system that provides base info: - The registration status of the domain (available, registered, expired, locked) - The registrar - A proxied email address through which to contact the registrant I figure that shouldn't fall foul of GDPR, let legitimate folks know who they have to contact to get their domains updated, and let people contact a domain's registrant if they need to.
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