I am in the hunt right now for a domain (I plan to use for email and such, meaning, things that would be tied to my legal person). As some of you know, by law in many places it is required to have a set of legally true information to register a domain (from name to house address, in case the domain needs to be verified to belong to a real person).
I was checking porkbun a second ago, and the privacy policy really does not give me confidence (they mention very clearly there is sale and ai training involved). I am from Europe so I would expect gdpr to be respected by default, however, they say I would have to send an email to get my rights and identify myself (I expect an Id upload which is not really a thing I want to do).
Considering all this, what are the better places for domains? I expect to pay more than porkbun, but if it people that do it right, so be it.
If you want to actually “get” a domain name from icann, you are required to give them identifying information. There is no way around that. Except for the part at the end of this reply.
You can go through incognito or njalla and maybe even someone else, but at that point it’s “their” domain and you’re just renting it. The difference may matter for your purposes. Think critically about what you are trying to avoid and accomplish.
It’s not clear to me what you as a self identifying European expect to accomplish by not verifying your id with a group that asks for it in order to comply with the privacy law you imply you’d prefer to have the protections of. This is another area where I would encourage you to think critically about what you’re trying to accomplish and what material conditions surround you.
If you don’t want to do all that, just break the law. There’s a bigass database of ids from a breach of some company that does in person id scanning. Each one is a few bucks and you could easily pose as one of those people.
Isn’t every registrar “just renting” domains? What is the pragmatic difference between regular registrars and “proxy” ones from the perspective of a registrant?
When you register domain in a normal way, you are assigned to be the domain administrator and entered into WHOIS. For the year lease, the domain name is yours, and your registrar cannot take it down unless they have the legal reason to. You can also transfer your domain to another registrar.
Proxy registrars like Njalla keep ownership of the domain, keep themselves in WHOIS and can take your domain back for any reason at any point, because it’s actually theirs. You also cannot move it to other registrars for the same reason.
What indeed!
Why what stops law enforcement from simply telling dns providers, with the force of a judges order behind them, that “your” domain should point to their servers which proclaim it to have been seized, or which clandestinely record the comings and goings of “your” visitors?
Has this ever happened in the past, and if so, what resources and mechanisms were put into play to accomplish it? Is this series of events a concern of yours?
These questions and more, not answered by me!
Any domain can be put on serverHold or redirected, and recently that has happened on autistici.org without even a court order. Seems to me like “owning” a domain the usual way offers no additional guarantees or benefit