The war of WHOIS information is escalating, and DomainTools is on the offensive.
GoDaddy is now keeping part of the publicly available WHOIS information private, for domains that are queried via third party tools.
At first, we thought that DomainTools had a special agreement with the largest domain registrar in the world, to display the full WHOIS information.
Alas, this is not the case anymore.
DomainTools now displays the line “Withheld by GoDaddy” for domains that are registered at GoDaddy.
An alert note appears as well:
“Possible Short Record – All Registrant, Admin and Tech contact data is currently redacted by GoDaddy on Whois queries to its ICANN-required Port43 Whois service.”
Citing protection against “unscrupulous spammers,” GoDaddy has disabled the majority of the WHOIS output via port 43 queries. These work only via the GoDaddy web site, and after a captcha is correctly answered.
Domain investors and industry professionals will find the new process time-consuming and even prohibitive for tasks that would take a few minutes to complete; transferring domains away from GoDaddy now takes longer, as the initial process depends on querying a domain’s WHOIS information by the gaining registrar.
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