March 2007

Since I’m covering a lot more of the latest news lately, I noticed yesterday that there is proposed legislation that will possibly anonymize domain registration information. The reason? Spam. Spammers are apparently accessing WHOIS information and using this information to send individuals unsolicited messages. The proposed legislation would allow “domain name registrants would be able to list third-party contact information in place of their own.”

Note that I emphasized “apparently.” While I’ve seen this practice happen in the past in minute amounts, I’m pretty confident that spammers are not using the WHOIS database for the kind of spam that plagues our everyday lives. Spammers have bots that crawl regular SERPs for that. Furthermore, most WHOIS query databases have limitations on the number of domains you can look up in any given time.

Additionally, once your email address is out there, it’s out there. Perhaps, if you choose to hide it later, it won’t be accessed by new generation spammers (unless they buy an old list), but people will have those email addresses until you change to a new one (and protect that new one). The only spam I’ve received related to any domain names I’ve owned are from domain “hijacker” companies, like DROA (the Domain Registry of America), companies who think it’s perfectly fine to con users into believing that their domain is about to expire — so let’s go renew it with another registrar — me! (Do I sound frustrated?)