I’ve written a story for The Register about a new report [pdf] regarding the Whois system for domain registration data. We all knew that Whois was a mess, but it’s good to have some facts and figures that show what a mess it is.

Here’s hoping this gives the endless, intractable discussions within ICANN about Whois a bit of a kick. I’m hoping Maria Farrell will write something about this report – she saw several years of her life chewed up trying to make some progress on this issue. Oh, I should also thank Jenny Kelly from NORC who was incredibly responsive and helpful.

Full story below:

77% of domain registrations stuffed with rubbish

Whois in charge? ICANN’t tell

An incredible 77 per cent of internet domains – nearly 90 million internet addresses – are registered with false, incomplete, or unverifiable information.

An extensive review of 1,419 representative domain names conducted by overseeing body ICANN, including direct contact with over 500 individual domain owners, produced some startling results [pdf]. Example: only 23 per cent of domain registrations display the owner’s correct name and physical address.

Worse, an extraordinary 29 per cent of domains are registered with patently false or suspicious information – a shady sign of online criminalty. The remaining 48 per cent of faulty registrations are in a grey area where people are either unaware or unwilling to hand over their identifying details.

But Jenny Kelly of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), who headed the investigation, warned against making broad assumptions about the initegrity of the Whois system for registration data. “What we found was that 23 per cent of domains had good information that we could verify but there are many others where we were not able to confirm the content and so were not able to say they were good,” she explained, citing as an example post-office boxes.

The survey found that Whois records for domains contain a lot of incomplete information – something that can be put down to the practices of different registrars. “The approach taken varies widely by registrar,” Kelly explained.

“As part of my background preparation, I tried to register domains with different registrars. It was clear that some companies have good checks: checking your zip code is right for the city and state you entered, and likely checking credit card details against the registered address. But others did not apply such checks during the registration process, although whether or not they apply them subsequently I don’t know.”

The findings will have far-reaching implications for the domain-name system, which has spent the past five years working under the broad assumption that 95 per cent of domain information was at least partially accurate.

The report itself expressed surprise that no incidences of identity theft were found – but it concluded, incredibly, that this was because such theft wasn’t needed. “It would seem that given the latitude that people have in choosing what information to provide when registering a domain name, identity theft may not be necessary. It is all too easy to enter any or no name, along with an unreliable or undeliverable address,” the report reads.

The reasons behind the widespread failure of the Whois system, which is supposed to ensure accurate domain registration information, are complex – but they stretch beyond complaints about the privacy implications of people posting their information online for anyone to view.

There are no mandated standards for registrars to check whether the information provided is accurate. A large number of domain registrants are unaware that the service even exists, and until a few months ago, the system only accepted ASCII English, causing millions of registrants to register with best-guess information.

The report notes that the majority of the issues behind the inaccuracy are within the ICANN community’s ability to fix. All registrars of generic top-level domains (such as .com or .info) have to sign a Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN and changes to that agreement can oblige registrars to improve the level of checking for domains.

ICANN is also in a position to provide ratings of different registrars so that consumers can be better informed about with whom they register their domain. However, both alterations in the RAA and the creation of a rating mechanism require a change in policy at ICANN – something to which registrars would need to agree.

Following the collapse of one registrar, RegisterFly, a few years ago that resulted in tens of thousands of individuals losing control of their domains, ICANN announced it would revise the RAA to make sure it didn’t happen again. However, the end result of its review was watered down over time by the registrars themselves before they were agreed to. A new set of amendments are currently under discussion.

Improving accuracy of the Whois system would also come at a cost, the report warns. “The cost of ensuring accuracy will escalate with the level of accuracy sought, and ultimately the cost of increased accuracy would be passed through to the registrants in the fees they pay to register a domain.”

Kelly wouldn’t be drawn into discussing the cost of such a system, but she did note that heavy competition in the registrar market has driven down costs to less than $10 per domain per year. She hypothesised: “If registration cost $20 rather than $10, would it stop people from registering domains? And would we find that it enables more security?”

The report may help break a decade-long impasse over the Whois service, during which conflicting interests have ensured that no progress has been made on much-needed changes. The last time a full study [pdf] of Whois accuracy was commissioned – by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2005 – it was reported that only 5 per cent of domain names contained “missing or patently false information.”

That report was dismissed by those in the know as being wildly inaccurate because it didn’t look into the accuracy of information, but only whether it appeared normal. Today’s report discovered roughly the same 5 per cent of nonsense information but found a far greater percentage of wrong or false information by looking at the actual data itself.

ICANN is obliged under its Affirmation of Commitments with the US government to maintain the Whois service as well as “assess the extent to which WHOIS policy is effective and its implementation meets the legitimate needs of law enforcement and promotes consumer trust.”

ICANN’s management has also clearly signalled that it intends to use the report to break the Whois impasse, with its Chief Operating Officer Doug Brent telling us: “Ultimately, any solution reached for Whois accuracy must be closely tied to ICANN’s contractual enforcement mechanisms which today go no further than requiring investigation of inaccuracy complaints.

“Sometimes, the thorniest problems are the most important to address, and we hope that putting some facts out on the table leads to a more informed debate, and an actual path to solutions.”

You can view public comment on the report – or submit your own thoughts – here.

Whenever you hear editors decrying the death of newsprint – and the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger did exactly that this week – there is always someone who points out that online advertising has jumped x percent in the past year and is now worth xx billion.

And the response is always: but that remains only a tiny percentage of overall advertising. The online world is here, it’s coming, but it’s not enough to sustain the system in place.

Well, online advertising may not be fully matured but it not for a lack of energy or innovation.

I’m sat in the chandelier-filled Starlight Ballroom in the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, Santa Monica, attending Domainfest 2010, and on stage are five sages of the online advertising world dissecting a business model idea put to them by an eager young domainer.

As conferences go, Domainfest is a pretty exciting one. It probably has something to do with the average age of the attendee (24?) and that the industry it seeks to cover is a fast-moving, ideas-filled world.

The “PITCHfest” that I’m watching invites five finalists to outline their idea for a new way to do online advertising – and make money from it. One at a time they come up to the podium, make their pitch and then deal with questions and comments from the sages on stage. (For full details on the pitches, see Domain Name Wire’s story.)

It’s a novel structure for a conference – somewhat like Dragon’s Den on TV – and it works, to the extent that you almost forget that every industry, when put closely under a microscope is incredibly dull.

Every industry has its jargon, but the Internet world insists on putting all its jargon into three-letter acronyms (TLAs). “The problem with CPC is the CTR. So what about PPC?” – these terms flow off the tongue so fast that you can miss them and hear new ones – did he say RPC? Did I hear CPR?

The presentations are good though – people who have clearly put a lot of thought and work into complex, advanced and automated systems – all to grab a few cents here and a few cents there. Add it all up and you might start making money.

Who’s clicking?

Here’s a question that I have though: who the hell are these people that are clicking on online ads?

I don’t. I don’t believe I ever have either. Not even the ads on my own site. Admittedly I’m a very bad example. I hate ads. I skip them without seeing them in publications; I wander off in TV ad breaks and use my digital recorder wherever possible to avoid them; I don’t recall huge billboards – even in Los Angeles where they are bigger than buildings.

It seems I’m not alone – one presenter boasts that his new system will get a CTR of 1.5 percent “which is absolutely unheard of”. What that means in plainer English is a click-through-rate of 1.5 percent, or 15 people in every 1,000 people that see an ad click on it.

Maybe the tough part of online ads is that it is possible to get these stats. When it is an ad in a magazine or newspaper, there’s no surefire way to know what impact, if any, they had. It’s not a pretty picture: advertising execs forced to recognise that most people are actually completely uninterested in work. You can even put a figure on it – 1.5 percent. And that’s high.

Of course what people are outlining isn’t rocket science – one guy’s pitch is basically that he makes text ads that look much nicer – but it is a sign that this is an expanding market. The atmosphere is lively, the décor is bright, the people are young and friendly, perhaps a little too geeky.

It is far from the mature market conference where middle-aged men in suits sit on a stage raised six feet above the audience and propound at great boring length to the assembled masses. The irony of course is that it won’t be until that happens that the world of online advertising is strong enough to support the monster publishing houses.

So after 18 months of retaining my UK phone while living in the US, I finally got tired of paying £30 a month for absolutely nothing and killed the contract. It ends next week.

Why did I keep it for so long? Well, for one, I didn’t expect to stay in the States all that long. I figured ICANN would drive me nuts within a year and I’d move back to Blighty. Plus I didn’t want to rely on just a work phone for contact with friends and family. And lastly I didn’t want to lose my telephone number – 07932 783686 – which I have had for over a decade.

Well, I am still at ICANN and so still in the States and I didn’t use my UK phone because to use it over here was prohibitively expensive. I don’t rely on just my work phone for contact – I mostly use Skype to contact friends and family (it’s free and it comes with moving pictures). And as for losing the number… Well I am the proud owner of a .tel domain name.

In fact, due to my name being slightly unusual, I have kieren.tel.

TLD innovation

The .tel top-level domain is a novel and interesting use of the domain name system (DNS) in that it stores information directly in the DNS i.e there is no website associated with it. You go through a special admin system that .tel runs and stick up your contact details – phone numbers, addresses, websites etc – and it sticks it directly into the Internet’s infrastructure.

The beauty of this is that I can update my contact details very simply, it updates very quickly, and all the details can be accessed by anything whatsoever that can connect to the DNS (which is basically every modern electronic device). What’s more, the download is very, very small so it is very, very fast.

And so that’s how I plan to keep in touch and how I hope everyone will be able to keep in touch with me. Just go to http://kieren.tel and you’ll see all my contact information.

Problems

All that said, I do foresee some potential problems with .tel in the future. For one, I’m not sure what impact having my details out there will have. Because it’s in the DNS, it is searchable and scrapeable. I am monitoring to see if I am swamped with spam (or the mobile phone variety).

I wonder if it will make my websites a target for automated spamming and so on. There may be some issues with privacy. But so far it’s worked well and I am confident I’ll figure something out.

Another problem while I’m here was that Vodafone – my UK mobile provider – was an unbelievable pain in the arse while I was trying to end my contract. It took me literally two weeks, six emails and three phonecalls to end my contract. And even then they kept insisting that I might want to reconsider. I don’t know whether their system has broken down, or if management is purposefully turning a blind eye to a system breakdown (or not fixing it) because it means profits in hard times, but I am not happy about it.

Incidentally, Vodafone also accidentally forgets to take things off your bill with remarkable consistency. Add-ons are something that is charged and then automatically refunded on your bill if you don’t want them i.e. there is the implicit assumption of being charged for services unless you actively say no.

Anyway, that gripe aside – go to kieren.tel And ponder if you want to get a .tel domain too. They are more expensive than a dotcom – typically around $20 where as dotcoms are usually half that (if you can find one you want). And not every registrar sells .tel domins (around 150 or the 950 or so registrars do – full list here).

But you don’t have the hassle and expense of building a website, and it serves a useful purpose. Plus, if this takes off, I can foresee people building apps for it that link into iPhones etc. We shall see.

I am going to have to make a determined effort to update this blog more often. I always feel better when I am writing. Anyway, just as an update: I am currently in New Delhi in the Maurya Hotel following a busy conference week. I’ll be heading to the airport soon to go to Paris, where I hope to meet up with various folk that are integral to the next two conferences coming up both in June: the OECD ministerial in Seoul, followed immediately afterwards by the next ICANN meeting in Paris.

But in between, and for Thursday and Friday this week, I will be at Domainpulse in Vienna giving a talk partly about my book, Sex.com, and partly about the history of making money from domain names. You can see the full programme here. It should be interesting: Wolfgang Kleinwachter, Peter van Roste, Sabine Dolderer, Patrik Faltström, Daniel Karrenberg plus a number of people I have yet to meet and look forward to doing so. If you’re going, see you there.