On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Janet Sullivan wrote:
Rich Kulawiec wrote:
1. Anyone controlling an operational resource (such as a domain) can't be anonymous. This _in no way_ prevents anyone from doing things anonymously on the Internet: it just means that they can't control an operational resource, because that way lies madness.
As long as that person is contactable, why should it matter if they are anonymous? If you get a quick response to abuse@some_anonymous_domain.net, does it REALLY matter to you if the person's name is Tom, John, or Susan?
There seem to be two definitions of "anonymous" floating around here. One seems to equal "no working contact information", and one seems to equal "private registration ala domainsbyproxy.net". I can understand why people might want to take non-existent whois records into account, but I just don't see the argument against anonymous records.
It matters if we're talking about Tom, John or Susan working for some commercial company and contacting me as part of the activity of that entity, in that case I'd like to know about the domain and don't want to see its whois data hidden. Same goes for ip block data used by commercial companies - I do not agree with having this data be hidden or not listing use/allocation of the ip block to some company. So my view of it is the same as current practice and laws (at least in US) which require business (including DBA) registrations in county/state registrar and requirying and making public corporate records, including address of the company and list of its officers. -- William Leibzon Elan Networks william@elan.net