Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) broadly requires that the mailing address, phone number and e-mail address of those owning and administrating a domain name should be made publicly available through the “WHOIS” directories. But this rule enables spammers, direct marketers, identity thieves or other attackers to use the directory for personal information. Although ICANN has been exploring changing WHOIS to enable greater privacy. There is a lack of consensus among major stakeholders as to what type of change should be made. However, with the offer of private registration from many registrars, some of the risk has been mitigated.

There are four contact positions in a domain”s WHOIS record, which are −

• Owner
• Administrator
• Billing and
• Technical

Some registrars will not shield the owner organization name to protect the ownership of the domain name.

Let us now have a detailed stepwise understanding of what is being discussed here.

Go to the URL https://whois.icann.org/en and then enter the domain name of which we want to see the public data.

The next step is to click on “Lookup” as shown in the following screenshot.

Enter the Captcha that is displayed on the webpage as shown in the following screenshot, then click on “Lookup”.

The information that this domain name has will be shown as follows. The main section is “Contact Information” which has some subsections like −

• Registrant Contact
• Admin Contact
• Tech Contact

Each of these sections have −

Name and Surname, Company name, Address, Phone Number and email address. The following screenshot shows the registrant name which in this case is GoDaddy.com, LLC

The following screenshot shows the information of when the domain name was registered and when it will expire.

While the last screenshot will show the name servers (DNS) of the domain.

The following screenshot has full information details of the domain name.