Hello Jay,
What about the status of a domain? Should this not be publically available?
Yes. I think it is a good idea to show status.
Your telling me that as the owner of a domain I would have to login at my registrar to check the expiration date on every domain I own?
Yes. This is how most other forms of ecommerce is done. Ie I don't look up a public directory to tell me when my hosting or mobile phone agreement is due to expire. Normally I am notified by my provider or I have a way of accessing the information based on some sort of authetnication.
That may be a solution you like, by I prefer if my hosting company and other technical people that service my domain have easy access to this information as well. I think more domains will lapse into expiration if easy access to the status and expiration date are not available.
That hasn't been the experience in Australia. On the contrary it has substantially reduced the amount of misleading renewal notices being sent around. Ie there has been a signfiicant benefit for registrants. Most ISPS etc have access to information about domain names they service through the relevant registrar. You are right there was an initial teething period where ISPs needed to update their systems to use the services provided by registrars, rather than the public WHOIS.
While we are on the road of hiding information, Why even show who the current registrar is? If they are not the registrar or don't have the auth-code they should just bug off. :)
Actually showing the registrars is probably the most useful piece of information, as it allows a registrant to identify their supplier of record (which is often confusing due to the amount of unsolicited advertising), and allows a consumer to contact the supplier in the event of mi-use of the domain name or inaccurate contact information. Regards, Bruce