As Alan pointed out on today's call, the reseller issue is complex. The problem is that resellers are a significant part of the gTLD market and it is difficult to measure the size of the reseller market. (And I have been doing this for decades.) Where resellers operate their own DNS, it is somewhat easier. However, many resellers use the DNS service of their registrar or others while running their own web hosting. To put this in some form of context, Godaddy has over 12,000 potential resellers using its DNS while having their web hosting outside of Godaddy's web hosting. Tucows is even more complex and has thousands of resellers. That is a large part of its business model. Most medium to large sized hosters will have web hosting spread over various providers and often have their own resellers that are often web developers.The terminology can get confusing here. A hoster hosts domain names. A web hoster (or web hosting provider hosts websites). There may be an overlap. Some registrars have their own web hosting operations. Die to ICANN's registrar model, some countries have no ICANN accredited registrars and their gTLD registratrions are completely outsourced to registrars in other countries. The typical ICANN registrar model (3R) is Registry -> Registrar -> Registrant That was the way that it was originally envisaged. In reality, it is often something like this: Registry-> Registrar -> (Resellers) -> Registrant As was mentioned on the call, there are mutiple registrar business models with some registrars having now public-facing buisness (they sell only ro resellers). Privacy and proxies also have to fit somewhere in the second chain. When the GDPR was introduced in 2018, some registrars took the opportunity to go completely dark on WHOIS data and redacted everything or almost everything. Others made WHOIS privacy a default.The current model works well for many existing registrars and there is likely to be pushback to anything that would increase costs. For most registrars, registrations are not high profit products. ICANN's registrar model was formulated in a much simpler time. What has happened since then is that the Internet has evolved and many ccTLDs have become the market leaders in their own countries. For gTLDs, that means that the ccTLDs are outselling them in those markets and there is an accreditation overlap between the gTLD registrars operating in those countries. If there is a substantial market for its customers, a gTLD registrars will acquire ccTLD accreditation. The rise of the ccTLDs has also encouraged some ccTLD registrars to give up their gTLD registrar accreditation. I think that there was some ICANN sponsored academic survey of privacy/ proxy gTLD domain names. It might be useful to get some idea of the scale of the issue. Things have probably changed a lot since 2012 and since any work was done one msauring the numbers of proxy/privacy domain names. Every month, I track the registrar and reseller market at a domain name level for the reports that I publish. The impact of privacy/proxy registrations even on reseller domain names has made things a lot more difficult since 2018.In terms of proxy/privacy, the country field in the WHOIS/RDAP records may no longer be reliable due to privacy being enabled by default on some large registrars. Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com ********************************************************** -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com