As the ICANN meeting in Singapore continues this week ICANN have announced that they will set aside $530,000 of their budget to conduct four different WHOis studies. It is thought that the decision to undertake these studies is partially to do with a request that came from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) back in 2008.

ICANN receive high numbers of WHOis complaints and all registrars are expected to cooperate if the domain is under their management. Following a complaint being received, ICANN forward it onto the registrar responsible for the domain(s) and give them a deadline to work with the registrant to have the issue corrected.

The Studies that ICANN will be conducting are as follows:

Who Misuses the WHOis?
It is forbidden to use publicly available WHOis information for marketing or spamming purposes and accessing the WHOis database through an electronic process to mine data is strictly prohibited. Not to say that it doesn’t happen however! It is unfortunately common for people to receive solicitations of business from companies who have used the WHOis information to pull out contact details, and then send out communications. This study will aim to identify who is exploiting the WHOis and how to best prevent this happening in the future.

Who registers and owns domain names?
This study aims to identify the different types of registrants that own domains, including natural persons, “Legal Persons”, Organisations and Proxy Service providers.

How are Privacy Services Abused?
It’s no secret that Privacy Pervices aren’t always used for the greater good, and the study aims to compare the different services that are out there and identify how often they are misused. The study will also aim to identify other ways in which WHOis services are exploited, such as people giving their own falsified addresses to protect their real address where a privacy service may be unavailable.

How Quickly do Privacy Services respond to requests?
When a Privacy Service receives an official request such as a notification of UDRP or other official communication from ICANN the appropriate action must be taken, which often involves disabling the privacy and displaying the legal registrant details behind the proxy information. This study will aim to measure response times to such requests and record how they are dealt with.

ICANN currently quotes that these studies will be completed somewhere between 4 and 12 months and the results will then be analysed and released to the community.

If you would like to read more about the Privacy Service that Domainmonster offers, click here!

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