Study examines use of privacy and proxy services.
A new report (pdf) released by ICANN yesterday says that 15%-25% of all registered domain names use some sort of service to mask whois information.
The study found that the majority of people masking whois use a proxy service, which means an entity actually registers the domain on the domain “owner’s” behalf, and then leases it to that owner. Only 15% use privacy services, which mask some of the whois information such as phone number or address.
ICANN’s Affirmation of Commitments with the United States government shows that keeping whois information open and public is a goal. Section 9.3.1 reads:
ICANn additionally commits to enforcing its existing policy relating to WHOIS, subject to applicable laws. Such existing policy requires that ICANN implement measures to maintain timely, unresitricted and public access to accurate and complete WHOIS information, including registrant, technical, billing, and administrative contact information…
Why would general pubic need access to billing information is beyond me
The sample size was 2352 domains..which could be a tad bit too less
http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm#one
500,000,000 domains (no idea actual number)
99% confidence
with +/- 3
requires 1849 samples. That’s pretty certain. This presumes the sample was randomly selected and not bias though.
I think it’s more like 180M domains, with about 100M coming from the tested TLDs. I think the sample size is appropriate.
You know, for as much as various folks whine about whois privacy being “only for cybersquatters and criminals”, I have a hard time believing that 15 to 25 percent of domain names are being used for cybersquatting or criminal activity. This report would seem to indicate the vast majority of domains under whois privacy are there for perfectly innocuous reasons.
If 15 to 25 percent of domain names were cybersquatting or phishing domains, I think the internet would have been shut down by now.