Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) writes "In the context of upcoming Congressional hearings on the accuracy of Whois data, I thought it might be helpful to provide some specific examples of the problems at issue here. With that motivation, I've prepared a listing of 988 domains registered by a group calling themselves "NicGod Productions" and "Domains For Sale."
NicGod is much like ordinary domain warehousers in that the company seems to seek to sell their domains for a profit, and they're like Tina's Webcam in that they tend to register domains allowed to lapse by prior registrants. But they're quite different in that they don't register the domains in their own name; instead, they use a mixture of names and organizations including, for some 425 names, "Alan Ginsberg" (a deceased American poet). They also don't register the domains using their own street address; instead, they use a variety of addresses from as many as nine different countries, and they seem to use voicemail and fax-forwarding services to receive requests to purchase domains in their inventory.
I'm certainly not the first to notice NicGod's activities; they've been UDRP'ed at least 27 times, and the OECD wrote up a jarring report of their experience with these folks. But my recent work goes a notch further in that I've documented what I believe to be a substantial portion of NicGod's inventory -- including, for example, schools (armenianschools.com, californiastateuniversity.com), government sites (flintpolice.org, winthrop-police.com), and medical information (doctorjohn.com). For each domain, I've extracted data from archive.org, Alexa, Google, and Yahoo to speak to the domains' prior contents & uses as well as their popularity.
My results are available at:
Large-Scale Intentional Invalid WHOIS Data
Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School"