The DoC’s National Information and Telecommunications Administration, which has responsibility over .us, has given companies that sell .us domains until today to shut down any private registration services they may have.

NTIA instructed NeuStar Inc, which is the contractor that runs .us, to inform companies including Go Daddy that private registrations services are, and always have been inconsistent with registrars’ obligations under the contracts.

Here we have a situation where we have a bureaucrat… who arbitrarily made a decision that will violate the privacy of thousands of law abiding Americans, Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons wrote on his web site earlier this week.

Parsons is calling for a letter-writing campaign, and says he already has some law enforcement officials and members of the House and Senate who agree with him.

Registering a domain name in most of the popular domains has always meant handing over your name, address, telephone number and email address to be included in a publicly searchable database known as Whois.

In recent years, registrars including Go Daddy and Network Solutions Inc have introduced proxy services, where the registrar keeps your contact data on file, but submits its own corporate details to Whois instead.

Parsons said Go Daddy introduced its Domains By Proxy service after hearing from a terrified female customer who said she had been stalked by a man and was afraid he would be able to find her using a Whois lookup.

Whois is also used by law enforcement, in the rare cases where criminals with web sites provide their true contact information when registering their domain, and by corporate lawyers who want to send threatening letters to web site owners.

The NTIA said in a letter to NeuStar that an accurate Whois database for .us domains provides an assurance of accuracy to the American public and to law enforcement officials who rely upon this information.

All registrant data is the property of the US government, and as such must be correct, current and complete, the NTIA said in a letter signed by Joseph Watson, associate administrator at the NTIA.

Jeffrey Neuman, director of law and policy at NeuStar, said that NeuStar is simply enforcing NTIA policy and its own registrar accreditation agreements, and that the decision was made by NTIA, not NeuStar.

Our position on .us is enforcing our contracts, he said. We don’t have a position on proxy services. NeuStar sent a letter to registrars last month saying the NTIA directed NeuStar to phase out the offering of such services.

Companies including Go Daddy will no longer be permitted to offer proxy services in .us as of today, but will get until January 26 2006 to phase out all their existing anonymous registration customers, the NeuStar letter said.

Neuman said that one of the bad things about proxy services is that if a proxy-offering registrar was to go out of business or somehow lose all its registrant data, the registry would have no records of who owns what domain.

NTIA has nominal control over all of the internet’s domains, but Neuman noted that this decision affects the .us domain only. Go Daddy, NSI and others can continue to offer proxy registrations in .com, .net and other domains.

But Parsons is not so sure. He wrote: I assure you, .us is just the first battlefield, it’s the test to see if we will allow our privacy to be taken away. If we allow this to happen, the next step is to take away our right to privacy for .com and other top-level domain names. And then, if we lose this privacy, who knows what’s next to go.

Neuman, who is on the Whois reform task force at the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, disagrees. I can say with confidence that what is happening in .us is not what is going to happen in .com, he said.

Parsons said he and his lawyers had been to Washington DC to argue Go Daddy’s case, but were stonewalled. Those affected by this decision were afforded no opportunity to provide commentary as to what effect or hardship it might have upon them, he said.

While Go Daddy’s proxy service makes it impossible to get a hold of somebody’s Whois data via a simple lookup, it is not completely anonymous. Law enforcement and lawyers can still get hold of contact data, but they have to ask Go Daddy directly.