Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

According to the New York Times BITS section, whois may become whowas due to it’s incredible abuse by spammers. If you’re not familiar, WHOIS is a large database similar to a phone book for websites. You can look up who owns a particular website and what their contact information is. In order to protect your information, most domain registrars offer private registration (like an unlisted phone number) to owners in order to prevent them from receiving spam. The growing necessity for nearly everyone to have private registration has forced ICANN to question whether the database(s) should just be scrapped.