Mikael Ricknäs reports:
Approximately 15 percent to 25 percent of domain names have been registered in a manner that limits the amount of personal information available to the public through WHOIS queries, according to the preliminary results of a report from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
Domain owners who want to limit the amount of personal information available to the public generally use a privacy or a proxy service. A privacy service lets the registrant limit the amount of personal information available via a search in a WHOIS database, while proxy services register domain names on behalf of registrants.
It’s the use of these two services that ICANN has surveyed, the organization said on Thursday. The main objective of the study — which was based on a random sample of 2,400 domain names registered under .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info — is to establish baseline information to inform the ICANN community on how common privacy and proxy services are.
Read more on Network World.
Hat-tip, Slashdot
Related: ICANN’s draft report can be found here: http://www.icann.org/en/compliance/reports/privacy-proxy-registration-services-study-28sep09-en.pdf [PDF, 124K].
The Staff is opening a 30-day public comment, from 2 October through 6 November 2009, and invites community comments on this matter.
The formal Public Comment Forum Box is located here http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/public-comment-200911.html#proxy
To submit comments: [email protected]
To view comments: http://forum.icann.org/lists/privacy-proxy-study/