What if there’s something illegal, violating copyright, etc. on the site? Or to take a less legal example, what if someone’s site is hacked? You need some way of getting in touch with the owners.
The snail-mail address of the registered agent would suffice. The cost of postage is sufficient to deter the least-determined spammers. And the most-determined spammers would be deterred by the most potentially profitable targets having legal departments handling the mail received by their registered agents.
Atleast in my area websites are also required to carry legal contact information somewhere on the site, which is far easier to secure against spammers than the WHOIS database.
That's fine, you just route to /dev/null everything that goes to the anonymised address; the email headers either won't be re-written or will be re-written a la RFC 5321. Either way you'll be able to easily identify emails sent to the anon email address and dump them on the floor.
> I don't think I ever received legitimate forms of coherent communication over my WHOIS emails.
Given that blog authors increasingly rely on Twitter for feedback (which I don’t use), I occasionally check whois to send notifications about dead links, rendering issues, etc.
Everyone ignores that in order for a blockchain to work, there needs to be a governance model that weeds out bad actors. In finance markets, this is somewhat ok because the governance model of laissez-faire economics (a common mental model to apply to finance) is simply “buy at your own risk”. That governance model won’t work for something like DNS — if control of a DNS name is maliciously reassigned, there would need to be some agreement around how that gets done and who has the authority to do that.
Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized authority model that Bitcoin has, it’s going to be a tiered trust authority in the same way that SSL roots work today. You’re going to end up with very similar governance models and the same organizations, just implemented in blockchain.
I think some of the important impacts of blockchain are yet to be recognized: I do think it will force us to fundamentally think about what consensus and rule of law means in any given scenario, and that will have some pretty outsized social impacts — especially in the way we run organizations.
We will have to be far more deliberate about how we design our governance models, but I worry they will become so complex as to grow beyond the possibility of oversight...
> Any real, reliable blockchain solution is not going to be the decentralized authority model that Bitcoin has, it’s going to be a tiered trust authority in the same way that SSL roots work today.
it's going to be very difficult to code for:
"we, as a network, accept this authority... to a degree"
https://www.icann.org/news/blog/data-protection-privacy-upda...