A recent change made by Identity Digital and auDA on the public whois tool was made that affects expired domains that transition to Pending Delete status. Previously expired domains after the 30 days of expiry, when their status changes to Pending Delete and they are added to the daily drop lists, had their full whois Registrant and eligibility details displayed when doing a whois lookup, but after this change all the whois details are completely gone and the only thing shown is “Domain pending purge.“
Why does this change matter and why was it done?
auDA is very protective of the whois and in particular the Registrants details and information.
Legally as soon as the domain hits Pending Purge / Pending Delete status the domain license has been revoked with no chance to recover the domain, so contractually the Registrant is no longer the owner of the domain. So legally it makes sense to strip out the Registrant data.
Important to note here that for Policy Delete domains, the whois details are not removed here as the Registrant is still the owner and has a chance to restore their domain eligibility.
We believe one of the other potential reasons to remove the Registrant data is due to the entry of an “Overseas” based Domain Rescue and Expired Domain Recovery service called and operating under ozregistry.com that extracts the whois of all the dropping domains on a daily basis and then send out emails to the prior registrant offering them to Rescue their domains for a service fee. This service under ozregistry.com is closely tied with Robert Kaay’s DropCatcher service. Everyone we speak with suspects that this is run by the same people, as they can not understand why they would only use DropCatcher and not also Drop.com.au, when even according to Robert they know that if Drop tries to catch a domain it will beat DropCatcher every time. So that makes you wonder if there is any truth in that.
It starts to make more sense if this was a driving factor why auDA made this change. auDA taking steps to stop illegal “overseas” services like that.
Changes to whois – Expired Domains that hit the Pending Purge stage have all Registrant details removed.
There is some discussion on another blog that tries to hide from the facts and instead brings up two other Australian based legitimate services that as far as we are aware are not sending out unsolicited emails on mass, and are using Drop.com.au to help secure domains for their clients. Both are named.
What is rather convenient is that the owner of OzRegistry.com is not named, which this article is about, not the other two services. So clearly Transparency is one sided.
ozregistry.com is the only known “Overseas” domain rescue service that is hiding behind an overseas shield, sending out unsolicited emails on mass, where they claim to based in the USA somewhere, address unknown, with servers in the Netherlands.