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Newbie domain registrant discovers Whois, has Twitter meltdown

Kevin Murphy, April 26, 2012, 12:36:28 (UTC), Domain Tech

The need for the domain name industry to enforce accurate Whois is often cited by law enforcement and intellectual property interests as a consumer protection measure.
But most regular internet users haven’t got a clue that Whois even exists, let alone what data it contains or how to use it.
A study (pdf) carried out for ICANN’s Whois Review Team last year found that only 24% of consumers know what Whois is.
This stream of tweets I chanced across this afternoon, from what appears to be a first-time domain registrant, is probably more representative of consumer attitudes to Whois.
UPDATE (April 27): I’ve removed the tweets per the request of the Twitter user in question.

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Comments (17)

  1. JS says:

    Made my day

  2. Abdu says:

    HAHAHAHA!

  3. Styles says:

    Well, I know what whois is, but never heard of domaintools and UK2.net So can someone tell me why or what she was having a meltdown over?

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      UK2 is a domain registrar slash web hosting company. DomainTools aggregates Whois records.

  4. Nadia says:

    “Omg, I’m IN THE PHONEBOOK. How dare they? What do I do now?!”
    Honestly, I can’t believe some people are so clueless. This made me laugh out loud.

  5. Sammy says:

    Wow. Oh. Wow.

  6. Harrison says:

    These tweets are great!
    I have definitively seen this trend that people have no idea about whois and are angry when they find out their info is online.

  7. Michele says:

    It’s amusing on one level, but forcing registrars to publish registrants details to the public without any restrictions is fundamentally flawed

    • mickmoran says:

      “It’s amusing on one level, but forcing registrars to publish registrants details to the public without any restrictions is fundamentally flawed”
      Its like t’internet then….

  8. Volker Greimann says:

    Whois at a whole is not a very well thought out process. I’d much rather see a semi-public thick whois behind a CAPTCHA “wall” with graded access levels.

  9. Mr Sennbrink says:

    “haha”
    Reminds me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

  10. Andrew says:

    I see the user also made her Twitter account private. Maybe she didn’t realize that was public, too.

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