So, if you have a domain you are required to publish a telephone number in the whois database for everyone in the world to access. I have a number of domains, including this one. I had a working email address and real mailing address in the contact fields for these domains, but the phone number was phoney. (My registrar had my real phone number, but it wasn't published in whois.)

Why? Because I don't want to publish my personal cellphone number so that every idiot who wants to buy one of my domains can call me up at any hour of the day and talk to me about it. There is no real technical or administrative coordination issue that could possibly come up with any of my domains that would require that someone be able to immediately reach my personal cellphone. An email would always suffice. I could go to the trouble of setting up a voice mail box, but I'd never check it, so this would be a waste of time.

ICANN's policy is that if any of your whois contact information appears to be invalid anyone can file a complaint about this. You receive an email and you are required to fix your contact information in 5 days. If you do not do so, you loose the domain. God forbid you are on vacation or in the hospital. God forbid your spam filter eats the email advising you that you have 5 days to comply. You must absolutely drop everything and fix your domain contact information immediately, because it is absolutely necessary that everyone in the world have a telephone number where you can be reached.

Because its so likely that people who are the victims of these invalid whois complaints won't manage to update their contact information in time, this process becomes a pretty effective way to steal their domains. You prepay a registrar to instantly register the domain if it becomes available, file your complaint, and wait a week. Poof - the domain is yours.

Someone did this to Blogworld this morning. Because I'm not interested in publishing my cellular phone number I purchased proxy whois information for all of my domains. This has the following side effects:

1. My domain name registrations now cost twice as much as they used to.
2. My name, real email address, and valid mailing address are no longer published in the whois database and are no longer available to people who have a legitimate technical or administrative reason to contact me.
3. Law enforcement filing a subpoena have exactly the same information that they had before.

In other words, DNS costs more for me, whois has less useful information in it, and a squatter almost got control of one of my domains. What an excellent set of policies!