Krishwords

There is a talk about getting rid of Whois for privacy reasons. I don’t understand the need to get rid of whois when there are other ways to protect the privacy. One of the registrars, with whom I have many of my domains registered, offers me free privacy protection. Instead of getting rid of Whois, they can force the registrar to offer optional privacy protection. The following are the reasons why I would personally want Whois to stay

• When a company contacts me or my company for a transaction, I do a whois check to see how long their domain has been registered. It helps me evaluate the risk factors. I suppose others will do the same thing about our company too.
• When I am in a lazy mode and want to change the nameservers of a domain or check its renewal date, I check the whois to get the relevant information (about the registrar where the domain is registered so that I can use the correct domain admin panel or the renewal date).
• As a person donning the avatar of security consultant, I find whois to be one of the useful services in my security toolbox.
• Many times, especially in cases where the other party was not using privacy protection, whois has helped me reach them to buy a domain of interest. It will not be handy in cases where privacy protection is enabled. However, since the owner of the domain gets to control the information that is showing up in whois search, it is not a serious privacy issue if offered with the option of free privacy protection. It will help those domain owners reach out to potential buyers for the domains they own.

The information that goes into whois is controlled by the owner of the domain and a privacy protection option gives the owner to anonymize the information offered through whois. Under such a scenario, getting rid of whois is meaningless. I want whois to stay.