On 01/17/2010 11:56 AM, John R. Levine wrote:
Legitimate businesses do not hide behind anonymous domain registrations.
I disagree. When companies come up with new products but while they are still thinking of a product name they will go out and acquire all the domain names for every candidate name of the product. They will do this using an intermediary, often a lawyer to get the belief that there is atty-client or work-product privilege and get the reality of a layer of isolation. This is a legitimate way of preparing for a product launch. I get several thousand spams a day. I hate spammers in general and I reserve a special place for joe jobbers - http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000236.html However, I do not accept the argument that we should cut our own privacy noses off in order to create a worthless aura that we are somehow harming spammers. For some reason relatively few people know that if one wants to track down sources, the IP address registration "whois" maintained by the RIRs is a more reliable way to locate someone who has control of a network path or machine than is the domain name "whois". By-the-way, there are reasons to believe that Can-Spam could fail a Constitutional challenge, particularly for domain names used in a political or religious context or when it affects the exercise of a fundamental right. --karl--