damn_registrars's Journal: The Future of WHOIS data

I have made a few recent Journal Entries on spam. Indeed, even my First Journal Entry was devoted to spam and how domain name registrars have a role to play in the problem.

Then last month, our good friends at ICANN announced that they would like to sell top-level domains for $185,000. I detailed why this is a terrible idea. In short, new global top-level domains (gTLDs) would pretty much negate any importance of WHOIS data that we currently have under the existing registration system because registrars would no longer need to report to anyone to sell domains within their own designer gTLD.

With that introduction aside, I will introduce a new spamming hall-of-shame entrant. We can thank our buddies at ICANN for this one, at least in part.

Today I received another discount viagra email, disguised as a political email sent from me, to me. It was odd enough that I opened the email but of course did not click the link. The domain of shame this time is

upnaarc.cn

Of course, the .cn TLD belongs to China. But I did a whois lookup on the domain anyways. Here is the fantastic data that resulted:

> whois upnaarc.cn
Domain Name: upnaarc.cn
ROID: 20081108s10001s82352257-cn
Domain Status: ok
Registrant Organization: æä¾ä¼¦
Registrant Name: æä¾ä¼¦
Administrative Email: [e-mail]
Sponsoring Registrar: åäæç½æç äææææéåå
Name Server:ns4.moleculemind.com
Name Server:ns3.moleculemind.com
Registration Date: 2008-11-08 15:21
Expiration Date: 2009-11-08 15:21

My usual tactic from here would be to contact the registrar. However, I would have a hard time finding out how to contact

åäæç½æç äææææéåå

I did look at the domain

sogou.cn

, where the email address associated with the domain came from. It appears to be a Chinese equivalent to Google. Obviously if I send an email to that address I am likely to only see more spam.

So how is this the future of WHOIS data?

Well, currently, domains that are sold under the ICANN-controlled TLDs (primarily .com, .org, .net) have to have legible WHOIS data available on-demand. However, country-specific domains do not have that requirement. And the new gTLDs likely won't, either. Which makes it impossible to find out who is behind new spamming operations. And I've already brought up Why filtering is the wrong answer for spam.

Re:

[damn_registrars]

if you can read Mandarin Chinese

Which I cannot. And even if I could read it, how would I ever be able to send an email to whoever has their identity behind it?

Granted, Mandarin Chinese is a commonly spoken and read language. But what if next-generation spammers put their WHOIS data up in Dzongkha [wikipedia.org] which uses Tibetan script and only has around 600,000 living speakers?