Fwd: ICANN News Alert -- Whois Registrant Identification Study, Draft Report
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.*" -Carlton ============================== Carlton A Samuels Mobile: 876-818-1799 *Strategy, Planning, Governance, Assessment & Turnaround* ============================= ** [image: ICANN] <http://www.icann.org/> News Alert http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-15feb13-en.htm ------------------------------ Whois Registrant Identification Study, Draft Report 15 February 2013 *Forum Announcement:* Comment Period Opens on *Date:* 15 February 2013 * Categories/Tags:* Policy Processes *Purpose (Brief):* This study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, uses Whois to classify entities that register gTLD domain names, including natural persons, legal persons, and Privacy/Proxy service providers. Using associated Internet content, the study classifies entities using those domains, and observed potentially commercial activities. Findings will help the community understand how Registrants identify themselves in Whois. *Public Comment Box Link:* http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/whois-regid-15feb13-en.htm
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./*"
-- */Patrick Vande Walle/* Twitter: twitter.vande-walle.eu <http://twitter.vande-walle.eu/> Facebook: facebook.vande-walle.eu <http://facebook.vande-walle.eu/> LinkedIn: linkedin.vande-walle.eu <http://linkedin.vande-walle.eu/>
participants (2)
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Carlton Samuels -
Patrick Vande Walle