CircleID

Mark, these are good ideas, just that they are ahead of their time as far as the industry will accept them as common practice.

In the 6 years I have had the opportunity to work with you in some professional capacity, I have yet to hear a bad idea come from you.

I agree with you that the mixture of accountability and privacy concerns do not always seem to meet in the middle with regard to whois data.

This continues to be an area that many are in agreement that evolution is needed, yet the best road seems to be untravelled.

Registrars seem to be presented with the burden of registrant detail validation, and are becoming more motivated to do so as policies become more clear on what their responsibilities are with regard to registrant data.

Many of the registrars operate as a side business to a hosting company or other enterprise.  Most of the others that have domain registration as a core focus appear to operate at narrow margins in the price competitive market that Domain Registrations have become.

The by-product of this added accountability, validation, and other requirements upon registrars, is that it creates additional technical and administrative overhead, translating into more operational cost.

To offset this, many of the registrars that build out systems for better whois management also appear to use that development time to create private registration or proxy registration systems.

While this helps to offset development costs, and help create sytems that aid the registrar in supporting the whois requirements, another thing that happens is that proxy or private registration happens as well.

My preference as an individual registrant, using a domain name for personal use, would be to not have my personal information exposed.  I would like to know when someoone looks up my information, and for what purpose it was requested, and who they were.  I believe that this would create a framework of accountability reduce SPAM and other adverse contact harvesting derivitives.

For a domain that is aquired for the purpose of electronic commerce, however, I feel that I would want people to be able to see the registration information on my domain name as a way to validate that I am a real business entity so that they can transact with me, and be confident and comfortable to do so.  The tradeoff as a registrant is that this exposes the email addresses and other contact information to contact harvesting.

Neither scenario is utopian, and I think that these are just two types of registrants and registration situations, and there are certainly many more scenarios and use cases that should be addressed as this evolves.

But, whatever direction things go toward, I am grateful that there are intelligent people who continue reminding the world that there are better solutions ahead.