I'm a digital marketing strategist with a strong grasp of current marketing tools and trends across Social Media, SEM, and PPC. Over the years, I've lead and integrated digital marketing campaigns from concept to execution – I just happen to be a former private investigator.
I help companies understand their target audience, and then create and optimize online experiences by leveraging their owned media, new tools, and trends to help drive profits.
I help companies understand their target audience, and then create and optimize online experiences by leveraging their owned media, new tools, and trends to help drive profits.
Who is ICANN?
ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. You can think of ICANN as the main and final court of the internet. They are the ones that decide the rules, they solve major disputes, and they have the power to take away domains from people if they feel domains are being used in bad faith. ICANN is very powerful.
What is happening?
Under new guidelines proposed by Mark Monitor and others who represent the same industries that backed SOPA, domain holders with sites associated to “commercial activity” will no longer be able to protect their private information with WHOIS protection services.
What is WHOIS
WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is database that stores the registered users or assignees of a domain name. There are hundreds of services that display WHOIS information. This information contains all the domain registration data. Using a service like: Whois.net, any anyone can run a domain name for free and figure out who the owner is, what their phone number is, where they live, when they registered the domain, etc.
There are companies that act as registered agents. They protect your information by putting up their names on your account.
So what’s the problem?
As private investigators, we need this protection. If you are running a home based business, and you own a website, anyone can run your domain name and figure out where you live. They’ll be able to find your phone number, organization, personal email, and more.
I’ll just put a fake address
Once a year ICANN requires you to verify addresses. If you add a fake address to your registration form, you run the risk of losing your domain name. You don’t want to add fake addresses to the ICANN registry. It’s not easy to get a domain name back once it has been seized by ICANN.
What Can You do?
Get involved, it takes less than 10 minutes. Visit this URL: https://www.respectourprivacy.com/ You have to provide them with your phone number (Regulation is trying to make it hard for people to block out this rule) they’ll call you and guide you through the process. I promise you it’s very simple, your privacy is not going to be violated, but they can’t put out the steps on the website since that’s against “policy”.
If you have any questions, please feel free to comment in the section below.