It seemed straightforward to me. You contact a domain registry service, give them your identifying details and they in turn register yourdomain.com to themselves. Is that how it works?
Now a subpoena by a governmental agency could presumably pierce that veil. But according to wikipedia, GoDaddy’s Domains By Proxy can be breached with a cease and desist letter or even a phone call. Wikipedia also states that other services host domain names offshore, with arms length transactions that make identification more difficult. (Which services? How difficult? Beats me.) Are there any services that respond to subpoenas only?
Oh, and back in 2007 one poster claimed that, “there are web site tools that can find this information regardless.” Wha? So a hacker can pierce the veil without so much as a phone call? I suppose that they could break into the relevant servers, but that doesn’t seem to me to be a standard web site tool.
What’s the story here? Are there defenses against dime a dozen spammers but not motivated trolls?
Sounds like the cyber equivalent of a numbered corporation registered to a law office on behalf of their client. Does DMCA trump attorney-client privilege, by the way?
Would the DMCA complaint be delivered to the domain registrar alone? Or do they go after the web host as well?
CNET had an article about speech-friendly domain registrars in 2007. Most companies wouldn’t respond to their survey. Of the few that did, they thought that “the French registrar Gandi.net and New Orleans-based DirectNIC offered the most extensive guarantees against unnecessary domain name suspension.” Notoriously GoDaddy only waited 52 seconds before they suspended Seclists.org owner Fyodor Vaskovich after they had notified him. Admittedly, this is tangential to the OP, but I can’t seem to find a more relevant discussion on the net.
If anonymity was really important, I suspect that registering your domain in your lawyer’s name would be more effective (and expensive!) than any $20/yr service. That said, some may want a little more protection than Domains By Proxy (GoDaddy), where your identity can be revealed with a simple phone call according to a 2005 CNET article. Their contract is pretty flexible as well, for them at least.
The discussions section of wikipedia directed me to Katz Global which offers anonymous registry. CNET opines that small outfits are fine for this sort of work. That said, I couldn’t find Katz on ICAAN’s registry list, though perhaps I didn’t dig deeply enough: I certainly haven’t made any inquiries. They have a link to the BBB at the bottom of their webpage: if you click it BBB says that, “This business is not a BBBOnLine participant at this time.” This could be an oversight, of course.
I have some sympathy for $5-$20/yr domain registrars, as they have to deal with all manner of scammers and law breakers. Still, those who break the law generally don’t have a problem giving false physical contact information on their account-- it’s those intent on obeying the law that have a potential anonymity issue.
Nonetheless, spammers and scammers tend to do business with a small number of domain registrars. That same 2008 article quotes John Levine: “Nobody’s ever been able to explain to me how anonymized domains meet the ICANN rules,” which apparently require registrant info to be publicly searchable online. Huh.