WHOIS and Corporate Identity

ICANN prescribes, that the registrar has to publish at the owner or registrant’s data the data of a person. ICANN has concluded, that this solution is necessary, as the Admin-C is nowadays in many cases not a representative of the company, which owns the domain, but a foreign person belonging to a web design office, provider or registrar. If we would follow the policy of ICANN, the ownership is not univocal anymore. A German judge for example could say, that not the company, but the person is the owner of the domain, because the person is listed as “owner” or “registrant” and

the company as “organization” at the whois of many registries. We propose, to publish only the company as the registrant, as long as ICANN does not critisize this in the special case. DENIC , by the way, accepts this solution. It is called “role” at DENIC.

You can register only some cc TLDs , if you own a settlement in this country. We suggest, ifa settlement is not prescribed, to take the standard data. We know a case, at which a settlement of a company became independent and the competitor of the former company, but kept all domains and websites, which had been registered at persons working in this settlement.
We suggest not to write your main e-mail address into the WHOIS. You should take a wrong e-mail address (but care, that your registrar or provider has you real on) or a special e-mail addresss for the WHOIS. It is a rare case that customer contact you with the help of the e-mail address in the WHOIS. But you will get a lot of spam if you use your main e-mail address as spammers are still able to read the whois server of registrars.

The idea of Corporate Identity is pledging for uniform data in all WHOIS, as far as it is possible. It is still more important, that splitted competences concerning domains and websites in a company could lead to different policies of persons in a company concerning domains and websites. Especially wild submitting to search engines could cause damages to the web promotion of a company. We suggest, that the person, who is really responsible for the domains, should be published as Admin-C. It is not possible, to make all data in all WHOIS completely uniform. The registries and registrars have different masks for domains, which differ in some items. It is especially difficult to update WHOIS datas, when the Admin-C has left the company. Some registries are not content with a signature at the company’s letterhead, but demand, that it must be the signature of the Admin-C listed in the WHOIS.