Greenguy's Board - Whois privacy protection may be dangerous

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Whois privacy protection may be dangerous

I read this page yesterday...

10 things you MUST know before you register a domain name with anyone

...and while it's certainly designed to drive traffic to EasyDNS.com and related sites, I thought point #5 about Whois privacy services might be worth mentioning for those of you who do use privacy protection on your Whois records.

Quote:

"The important thing to know here is that in the eyes of the domain Registry to which all the Registrars interact, and the Registry's oversight body (like ICANN, or in Canada, CIRA), whoever is listed in the domain whois record as the domain Registrant is the legal owner of the domain name. Keep that in mind, if you use a service like this, they own the domain, not you, notwithstanding whatever contract or Terms of Service you enter into with them to "own" this name on your behalf. If it lands in a dispute proceeding it will be an open and shut case: they own the name."

Some of the other nine points may interest you too.

numbering things increases readership

So what you are saying is that somebody (not me of course) could do some real illegal stuff and when the feds show up on their door they can say they don't own the domain, hmmm.

This is why I keep a mailing address on the dark side of the moon protected by sharks with lasers on their heads.

Thanks for the info, Simon. Very good to know.

I registered a new domain this week and sought a new registrar as well, read that article before I shopped.

When registrars go belly up, their assets are sold off to another registrar in bulk. New registrar will do what's best for customer satisfaction to keep people paying their fees.
I don't think anybody would want to go through tens of thousands of domains and try to sell them off with all issues involved. The work and resources required for such action would be immense and I doubt it would be nearly as profitable as going on with private registration.