Other useful finding: "33 percent (± 2.3 percent) appear to be registered by natural persons", So much for the often expressed opinion that individuals registering domain names names are a very small minority that has to be considered collateral victims of the open WHOIS policy. One third is actually a large proportion. On the methodology, I do not understand why NORC checked DNSBL listings, which are mostly used for fighting e-mail spam. This is even more of a paradox because they focused on reviewing web sites and FTP servers. Who uses FTP servers these days ? Domain names may used solely for e-mail, but they were not checked out. Given the small sample, I wonder why they did not send out an e-mail to the domain registrant, asking if they were an individual or a business. They would have avoided a large number of unknowns in their research. Patrick On 16/02/13 16:32, Carlton Samuels wrote:
Grist for the mill, from Appendix A: Exploratory Analysis Report document:
"For each of the 1,600 domain names, we tried to determine if the domain user could be considered a legal person or a natural person. Table 2 shows that for most domain names, we could not make such a determination because */almost half the domains were parked domains or had no online content at all/*. */Only 11.5 percent of the domains had content, but had an unknown apparent domain user type./*"
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