Domain name body may relax disclosure rules

NEW YORK — Many owners of Internet addresses face this quandary: Provide your real contact information when you register a domain name and subject yourself to junk or harassment. Or enter fake data and risk losing it outright.

Help may be on the way as a key task force last week endorsed a proposal that would give more privacy options to small businesses, individuals with personal Web sites and other domain name owners.

“At the end of the day, they are not going to have personal contact information on public display,” said Ross Rader, a task force member and director of retail services for registration company Tucows Inc. “That’s the big change for domain name owners.”

At issue is a publicly available database known as Whois. With it, anyone can find out the full names, organizations, postal and e-mail addresses and phone numbers behind domain names.

Hearings on the changes are expected next week in Lisbon, Portugal, before the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the main oversight agency for Internet addresses.

Resolution, however, could take several more months or even years, with crucial details on implementation still unsettled and a vocal minority backing an alternative.

Under the endorsed proposal — some six years in the making — domain name registrants would be able to list third-party contact information in place of their own — to the chagrin of businesses and intellectual-property lawyers worried that cyber-squatters and scam artists could more easily hide their identities.

“It would just make it that much more difficult and costly to find out who’s behind a name,” said Miriam Karlin, manager of legal affairs for International Data Group Inc., publisher of PC World and other magazines. She said she looks up Whois data daily to pursue trademark and copyright violators.

Privacy wasn’t a big consideration when the current addressing system started in the 1980s. Back then, government and university researchers who dominated the Internet knew one another and didn’t mind sharing details to resolve technical problems.

Today, the Whois database is used for much more. Law-enforcement officials and Internet service providers use it to fight fraud. Lawyers depend on it to chase trademark and copyright violators. Journalists rely on it to reach Web site owners. And spammers mine it to send junk mailings.