Hi Mike,

Quoting Mike on Thursday April 07, 2005:
| 
| I wasn't saying id.au..I said .au.
| If we looked at someone like whois.com.au
| We can see here what I'd like everyone to see..
| Sadly though this isn't the case..
| The company details and my email details are all publicly available.
| The details I have here are very similar in form to most of the "normal" 
| registrants in the .com.au.
| All we need to do then is start the search from there..
| I won't detail it here for the engines thx Kim, but rest assured it would 
| be pretty easy for anyone to get a start at finding the directors or the 
| company.

Understood, but I don't think that is an issue for companies. Privacy
rights apply to individuals. Many companies use role accounts in
the WHOIS if they don't want individuals listed there (e.g. whois
ozemail.com.au). A business has no right to privacy.

If the issue is the individuals listed as contacts are having their
privacy breached because they unwittingly provided information they felt
would not be public, but became public - then that is an issue I could
maybe agree with. But the solution to that is to make the obligations of
domain registration clearer at the time of the transaction.

| [Example: person wants a domain name name anonymously]
| Company based registration without the need for a searchable whois entry.
| I'm not saying the data won't be given, I'm saying it won't be available 
| without a record being created for a good reason like a warrant.

There is a public interest in having contact details for a domain above
and beyond law enforcement. For example, there are technical reasons why
the administrator of a zone needs to be contacted from time-to-time. If
something is going awry and I want to speak with a zone administrator, I
don't want to have to file a legal case against them to get a warrant.
That is just one reason we have the WHOIS.

If someone wants a domain name which does not have any WHOIS data
associated with the name, there are 99.999%+ of the world's zones
to choose from. They could have savetherefugees.foo.com.au, and the
foo.com.au administrator could keep the owner of the domain's identity
secret.

Someone could create such a service pretty easily, and offer free
registrations if they so desired. In fact, if there was a strong need
for this, perhaps there would be a role for a .anon.au 2LD chartered
purely for the purpose of anonymous domain registration? Who knows.
There are plenty of options.

kim