Yesterday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at a family event. For part of that time, I was chatting with a friend of the family who is Rabbi. I had not spoken with this Rabbi for quite some time, and of course he asked what I do for a living. I told him about my business.

The Rabbi knew a bit about domain names because of an experience he had. He told me he owned Rabbi[Name].com for several years but accidentally let it expire. By the time he realized what happened to the domain name, it was too late to recover it. The domain name is now owned by a large domain investment company and is listed for sale for a little under $3k. The Rabbi couldn't understand why it would be worth that much money to someone, and he opted to register the .net domain name instead. I briefly explained to him about the business of domain name investing, and he understood the basics.

The Rabbi didn't pass any judgement about domain name investing, but I felt a bit guilty about what I do. I am sure I buy domain names at expiry auctions that were the → Read More

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) covered some news about an error that was caused by using an incorrect domain name in an email address. The error involved the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). Here's what happened, according to SMH:

"The bank on Friday said it had conducted an information security investigation, after it emerged that last financial year staff had inadvertently sent 651 internal emails to email addresses with the domain name cba.com, rather than the bank's actual domain name of cba.com.au."

GDPR went into effect last week. Even though GDPR is a European Union data protection and privacy regulation that does not cover Americans or other people who are not EU citizens, some domain registrars totally eliminated public Whois lookup information to ensure they do not violate GDPR regulations and potentially expose themselves to serious penalties.

I have found that some domain name registrars have not eliminated public Whois lookups and Whois information, and I want to share what I found with you. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of registrars, and as far as I can tell, Whois information is only publicly available for registrants who do not have a European presence. I used a combination of registrar Whois searches, ICANN whois searches, and DomainTools Whois searches to see which registrars are blocking information and which are still showing information.

I invite you to share the name of registrars that are not using something like "Data Protected" for Whois lookups as you find them.

Registrars still showing → Read More