Nominet Compromising UK WHOIS Privacy, Wants To See Gov't-Issued ID

ktetch-pirate (1850548) writes Earlier this week, Nominet launched the .uk domain to great fanfare, but hidden in that activity has been Nominet's new policy of exposing personal domain owners' home addresses. Justification is based on a site being judged "commercial," which can mean anything from a few Google ads or an Amazon widget, to an email subscription box or linking to too many commercial sites, according to Nominet reps. In the meantime though, they want your driving license or passport to ensure "accuracy" because they "want to make things safe."

Re:the internet is growing up

[RelaxedTension]

You forget that the details being available is where things started, and the option for details to be hidden showed up because of the problems having that information openly available has caused. The "social will" you talk about is not society at at large, it is governments and law enforcement wanting that information out in the open for their own purposes. General society either outright prefers the ability to remain anonymous or could give a crap about the details being shown except in very specific cases.

Having a website in no way equates to driving a car, that is a ridiculous analogy. Your driver's license is not openly available to millions at any given time, and a website is not a large vehicle that can be driven into a crowd of actual flesh and blood people. And if the service provider has monopoly, where exactly do you take your business?

this should apply to all domains worldwide

[bl968]

Every single domain should have accurate and verifiable information for the owner, administrative, and technical contacts. The use of services which anonymize or mask domain owners should be prohibited.Whois was intended to enable you to identify the ownership of a domain and who to contact about it.