There are thousands of sites and services on the ‘net that offer domain name whois lookup services. As of last night many of them may have stopped working. Why? Many of them rely on fairly rudimentary software that parses the whois from Verisign (for .com and .net) and then relays the query to the registrar […]
In common with several other ccTLDs, the .nz ccTLD is split into two bodies. While the registry operator is NZRS, the policies are managed by a different entity The Domain Name Commission. They’ve recently been reviewing their whois related policies and have come up with a proposal which would allow private individuals to opt out […]
Last night Google unveiled their new plans for global domination, which involves the company morphing into something new “Alphabet“. And new TLD types around the globe rejoiced, as the online behemoth chose to use a .xyz domain name for their big reveal (They also made a funny reference to another .xyz in the source code […]
Nominet, the .uk registry, announced today a number of policy changes that impact how they handle whois data. The new policy comes after the registry conducted consultation with stakeholders. So what is changing? Essentially there are two key elements: Criteria and handling of “opt out” requests Introduction of whois privacy / proxy services Under the […]
ICANN comment periods on policy proposals don’t normally garner much attention. In the case of the current comment period on proxy / privacy services, however, things are very different. To date several thousand comments have been filed, while the topic of the policy proposals has received media attention across hundreds of outlets. Today, however, I […]
As of midnight Irish households will have to pay water charges. Every household in the country has been sent information about getting setup with the new water authority including getting an online account and paperless billing. They’re using water.ie But they do not control water.ie – it’s not registered to them and never has been. […]
Jean-Francois Baril was interviewed by Brad White earlier this week about the Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services’s final report. The EWG, which was formed in early 2013 was tasked with reviewing the current whois system and to come up with an alternative. Jean-Francois explains what the report does, why it was done and […]
ICANN has opened a comment period in relation to whois conflicts with local law / data privacy law. Of course anytime ICANN, or anyone else, tries to make any changes to whois policy there are issues. Whois is, for a variety of reasons, an emotive subject. One of the areas that Article 29, several registries […]
ICANN has published a study on “whois misuse”. It’s been several years coming, having initially been requested back in 2010. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but plan to over the next few days. Full details here
Disclosure: I’m a member of the group that worked on this I posted in some length about the proposal over on the company blog a few days ago, but ICANN have since posted the video to youtube, so here it is: I wasn’t included in the video introduction as I didn’t get a chance to […]
