Hi Robert,

in 99,9% of the cases, the customer we forward the complaint to is not the spammer, but the service provider used by the spammer for their domain registration services, e.g. the party who has the closer relationship and can actually do something about the issue, such as disabling their customers access to the service.

Also, our treatment of WHOIS is not in violation of ICANN contracts, but in compliance with it. Check out the Temporary Specification to the agreements that ICANN put out.

We are working hard to bring back some model to provide access to registration data to parties with a legitimate interests, but that ICANN policy work is slow, regretfully.

Best,

Volker

In message <23ad49c8-8fc4-41fa-a8fc-cae3479ad89d@key-systems.net>, 
Volker Greimann <vgreimann@key-systems.net> wrote:

In the domain industry, we were required to provide an abuse contact, 
however the reports we get to that address usually deal with issues we 
cannot do much about other than pulling or deactivating the domain name, 
which is usually the nuclear option. So we spend our time forwarding 
abuse mails to our customers that the complainant should have sent to 
the customer directly.

Digital Ocean does the same thing.  If you send them a spam complaint,
they will thoughtlessly and immediately forward it on directly to their
spammer customers, as you do, so that that spammer customer will then
know exactly who ratted him out, and thus, who he should put out a
contract on, to have that party immediately DDoS'd.

You sir, and your company, are part of the problem.

In fact your entire industry is also.  Working together you have all
succeded in serving you own financial ends while shamlessly twisting
and exploiting the true meaning of GDPR, using it as a blunt instrument
to demolish and bludgeon to death the perfectly usable system that used
to be called "WHOIS"...  in clear violation of your contractual commitments
to ICANN I might add... a system (WHOIS) which is now little more than a
useless joke for all practical purposes.

Congratulations on maximizing your own revenue at the expense of everyone
else, and at the expense of civilization and a civilized Internet.

I can only hope that the facts of what you and your company have done, and
what the entire domain registrar inustry has done, will ultimately become
a part of your permanent epitaph, following you to wherever you go from here,
which I have some hopes will not be upwards.

Please let me know if I have failed to be adequately clear.


Regards,
rfg