Privacy for domain owners moves forward

[Mystic]

Many owners of Internet addresses face this quandary: Provide your real contact information when you register a domain name and subject yourself to junk or harassment. Or enter fake data and risk losing it outright.

Help may be on the way as a key task force last week endorsed a proposal that would give more privacy options to small businesses, individuals with personal websites and other domain name owners.

"At the end of the day, they are not going to have personal contact information on public display," said Ross Rader, a task force member and director of retail services for registration company Tucows. "That's the big change for domain name owners."

At issue is a publicly available database known as Whois. With it, anyone can find out the full names, organizations, postal and e-mail addresses and phone numbers behind domain names.

Hearings on the changes are expected next week in Lisbon, Portugal, before the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the main oversight agency for Internet addresses.

Read Rest of the Article (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2007-03-21-domain-name-privacy_N.htm)

[Submerge]

I can't wait for this to go into effect. I hate having my info out there like that, no one needs to know where I live and my telephone number. They can email me or some other alternative.

[Arthur07]

We, have something very similiar offered by nominet.org the UK registration authority.

If an individual registers a domain, they can "opt out" and only their name is displayed on a whois request and there is no additional fee for the service.

This service is only offered to individual, not companies or businesses.

[boron]

Namecheap offers personal info hidding for six months period for free.

[Mystic]

Currently what a lot of services do is, they put their company info instead of the customer (the actual domain owner) info.

[Submerge]

Namecheap offers that to a degree. If you have a registrar license, you can still access the blocked information. Supposedly, that is why Google has a registrar license.