> I was not happy when ICANN began to allow privacy features in domain registration data, and I never made mine private
The issue for me is that you can't simply publish contact information. It requires you to either publish a legal owner in full or nothing. I can't publish abuse@example.org as contact method (because, yes, I do want to receive an email if someone finds an issue with my services), I need to publish also a legal name, address, sometimes a phone number. Those things cost money to set up to be fake-but-legit (burner SIM card, rent a letterbox somewhere, get someone else to submit their name and ID card) whereas an email address is inconsequential to publish and I can rotate it monthly to avoid it becoming enrolled on too many spam lists
So my sites never provided contact info via WHOIS when I could avoid it, yet I'd think my sites are as reputable as they come. You can always find a plain old email address via some link on the homepage and I have no spam filter (just email address rotation) so there is no chance that you're algorithmically filtered out, either
In the case of YC they defer to the AWS dns admins but you can set it to whatever you want unless your DNS provider does not let you. I've always run my own DNS so maybe that's less of an option for hosted DNS these days for all I know.
I had forgotten about that email address! And I'm not sure I set it correctly on email servers after I was a teenager and did things per the instructions, as I didn't see it being used for anything and it's just another potential way to funnel spam to your email host. Maybe someone does use it then? Do you know of any type of system or situation where this is used?
The issue for me is that you can't simply publish contact information. It requires you to either publish a legal owner in full or nothing. I can't publish abuse@example.org as contact method (because, yes, I do want to receive an email if someone finds an issue with my services), I need to publish also a legal name, address, sometimes a phone number. Those things cost money to set up to be fake-but-legit (burner SIM card, rent a letterbox somewhere, get someone else to submit their name and ID card) whereas an email address is inconsequential to publish and I can rotate it monthly to avoid it becoming enrolled on too many spam lists
So my sites never provided contact info via WHOIS when I could avoid it, yet I'd think my sites are as reputable as they come. You can always find a plain old email address via some link on the homepage and I have no spam filter (just email address rotation) so there is no chance that you're algorithmically filtered out, either