If current ICANN regulations require you to put out all your personal info, how can your registrar hide it for a price? It just seems like a way to get more $$$ from you. I'd like to hide my info for all my domians but I've got so many domains now, it would be costly. I could just put fake info up, but that would be grounds to revoke my domain ownership. What's your take?
Why would you want to hide your whois info? If you want to hide it so bad, then the safest way would be to buy whois protection. I guess ICANN can still get the info from these registrars, so whois protection isn't really a violation of ICANN's rules.
It's not ICANN that I'm worried about. I've already gotten real mail SPAM and calls trying to solicit credit card info. I know they got my info from whois because I use a PO box and a certain phone number for whois.
Also, check out these guys -- Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States Eric
if bulk renew domains from godaddy they give free whois also so maybe the same holds true if you renew 3 or more
That's a GoDaddy special, after you'll have to pay full price, they have the most expensive whois protection I've come across. RegisterFly is the cheapest, but they suck. Anyhoo, back to my original question: If current ICANN regulations require you to put out all your personal info, how can your registrar hide it for a price? Does anyone know?
As momo points out, you're hiding the information from the public, not from ICANN - they have authority over every registrar and none would fail to comply for an information request if they want to maintain their ability to be a registrar ... we had a copyright issue recently and the whois was protected and the registrar would not assist; one DMCA complaint to ICANN and once they validated the violation, we had the necessary information in a matter of hours.
Namecheap.com give you a free 1 year Whoisguard with new registrations and is pretty cheap to renew after the 1st year. Got all my domains with them.
That's only recently been passed through, I lost my Whois protection on a US domain last month - I ended up giving it up as I got paranoid when I had some hate mail through one of my other sites. I decided it was wiser not to have my home address and details attached to the site in question. I had a splurge on all my whois info after that - in a panic.
When a service like Domains by Proxy, Inc. register a domain and put their name on the whois information, can we say that the domain technically belongs to them? So there need to be a separate contract between them and the domain owner. What I do is register a virtual office and a free email account and use it on the registration. Gmail and Yahoo can deal with the junk mail.
All of my domains have the privacy except for one, that will change after I transfer it to godaddy. But for now I have a PO Box as the address and a FREE voicemail number as the phone number.
WebWriter, if I understand correctly, you cannot have a P.O. Box as an address for a whois. To answer the thread question, sign up for a dnoa.org membership. For $6.95 a year, you can get unlimited whois privacy.
Where does it say that you can't have a PO Box for whois? I know that it used to be a rule that you couldn't list one on your newsletters (CANSPAM);it had to be a physical address. But I just read that you can use one for your newsletters as long as it's valid. As for whois, I've never heard that you couldn't use a PO Box.
Would using my middle name be legal? It is after all my name. How about just a last name? What if I have a network and I put down my the name of my network of sites as owner? I've seen some people just use their domain name as owner name, is this valid?