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Abuse of Whois System Still Out of Control
By Larry Seltzer

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It's still easy to steal an identity with false whois information.ICANN has made some improvements in the process of securing whois data and limiting counterfeits. But neither it nor any other enforcement agencies seem interested in plugging holes or stopping abuses.

How would you react if you found out that someone was trying to impersonate you in order to defraud and the authorities ignored your complaints about it? I've been in this position; the authorities are varied and numerous, and they include ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. All of them, including ICANN, let me down.

ICANN has fixed some problems in domain name abuse in recent months. It couldn't have been easy to put the huge dent in domain tasting that ICANN has put. No doubt VeriSign was unhappy with this, having made zillions on tasting, although it couldn't protest too publicly. And ICANN could and should have gone farther against tasting, but it went pretty far. But other policy lapses by ICANN have not been addressed.

I have been the owner, for many years now, of the domain larryseltzer.com. Go check the whois on this domain and what you see there is me.

In May of 2007, some person registered larryseltzer.net in order to impersonate me. The person basically didn't get away with it, but that's not what matters. I think I know who this person is, but that doesn't really matter either, because nobody in a position to help is interested in doing so. 

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