Spotlight falls on Icann's dubious dot-com car boot sale

NEWS Icann, the organisation that manages the domain name system has launched an investigation into privacy concerns relating to the Whois database. The database is a free source available to anyone that wants to search for details of domain name owners. It holds vast amounts of personal information, which can be resold to direct marketing companies by registrar VeriSign. Privacy groups have slated this practice and claim it promotes the use of spam by ruthless marketing companies. Icann wants to gain feedback from individuals and companies to gauge whether it should change its Whois policy. Questions in the survey include whether registrars should be allowed to partake in this reselling practice. The survey can be found at http://www.icann.org/dnso/whois-survey-en-10jun01.htm and is open until 31 July 2001.