The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash.
All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe.
And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.
If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash.
All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe.
And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.