News in 2007

Privacy for domain owners moves forward . Actually this has both advantages and disadvantages.

If you register a domain others want, they can find out your complete background using the whois details. If you give a valid name, address and phone number, you receive crank calls and there is a lot of speculation on forums . If you do not provide valid information, you could lose ownership of  the domain. This is one of the reasons I have stopped registering .in domain names, privacy cannot be enabled for them.

On the other hand, domain name resellers , especially in India have bad ethics. For the first 3 domain names I registered (nearly 5 years ago), they took my money and either registered in their name or used their email as the contact email. They use it to blackmail their customers into using their unreliable and expensive hosting. I spend hundreds of hours developing my websites, what right do the resellers have to assume ownership of these websites? 

Fortunately, I was able to extricate my domain names from the 2 resellers (of  different registrars) with great difficulty.  But with the recent Registerfly problems, I wonder how reliable the registrars themselves are. Is the money I pay for domain registration going to the registries or for funding other activities? (Ok, the registrars also have personal privacy protection!).

I am very careful online, I never chat with anyone online, or join any social networking site to make “friends”, but I do not enable privacy for many of  my domains. If the records are available at a public place, at least you have some proof of ownership.