[tech, newmedia, law] Actual domain privacy?
I would like to buy a domain for Siderea-stuff. I have one in mind that's available and everything. There's one catch.
I'd really, really rather not associate the domain with my professional name. Or my credit cards, which are under my professional name.
Now, most domain registrars offer some sort of privacy service for WHOIS records, for a fee. The problem is, these are crap.
To expand upon that, there are two situations, both of which are pretty critical ones, in which the only ways out are to drop (or to have already dropped) your privacy service and expose the "real name" of the owner:
1) When a domain registrar goes abruptly out of business. This actually happened. The only way people had of proving that they were the owners of their domains and getting them control of them through another registrar was their names appearing in WHOIS.
2) When you want to move your domain out of one registrar and into another, you need to drop privacy protection to demonstrate you're the real owner of the domain.
None(?) of these privacy services give you any sort of contract or even a receipt to prove they hold the domain for you.
Additionally, there's the fact that you're trusting the domain registrar and whomever they hire, and the privacy services, and whomever they hire, to keep the secret of who owns your domains. That's trusting an awful lot of people, some of whom are no doubt poorly paid and unevenly gruntled, to never decide their income would be for the better if they sell you (and a couple million adjacent records) out to organized crime.
Seems to me, the only[*] real way to have domain privacy is to hire someone - not a company but an individual - that you can trust, and enter into a contractual relationship to have them act as your agent and buy and administer the domain for you.
Which means... I think it sounds like what I want is a lawyer. They act as agents, they have special legal privileges of confidentiality, they are under special social pressures to be trustworthy (their license to practice is hostage for good behavior), and they do contracts.
Am I right? Is this already a thing? Would this be the sort of thing I could hire a lawyer to do for me? Are lawyers generally hireable to buy/rent things in trust for other parties?
* Also, there's forming a shell corporation "off-shore", but involves a lot of rigamarole and $5k, when last I checked.
I'd really, really rather not associate the domain with my professional name. Or my credit cards, which are under my professional name.
Now, most domain registrars offer some sort of privacy service for WHOIS records, for a fee. The problem is, these are crap.
To expand upon that, there are two situations, both of which are pretty critical ones, in which the only ways out are to drop (or to have already dropped) your privacy service and expose the "real name" of the owner:
1) When a domain registrar goes abruptly out of business. This actually happened. The only way people had of proving that they were the owners of their domains and getting them control of them through another registrar was their names appearing in WHOIS.
2) When you want to move your domain out of one registrar and into another, you need to drop privacy protection to demonstrate you're the real owner of the domain.
None(?) of these privacy services give you any sort of contract or even a receipt to prove they hold the domain for you.
Additionally, there's the fact that you're trusting the domain registrar and whomever they hire, and the privacy services, and whomever they hire, to keep the secret of who owns your domains. That's trusting an awful lot of people, some of whom are no doubt poorly paid and unevenly gruntled, to never decide their income would be for the better if they sell you (and a couple million adjacent records) out to organized crime.
Seems to me, the only[*] real way to have domain privacy is to hire someone - not a company but an individual - that you can trust, and enter into a contractual relationship to have them act as your agent and buy and administer the domain for you.
Which means... I think it sounds like what I want is a lawyer. They act as agents, they have special legal privileges of confidentiality, they are under special social pressures to be trustworthy (their license to practice is hostage for good behavior), and they do contracts.
Am I right? Is this already a thing? Would this be the sort of thing I could hire a lawyer to do for me? Are lawyers generally hireable to buy/rent things in trust for other parties?
* Also, there's forming a shell corporation "off-shore", but involves a lot of rigamarole and $5k, when last I checked.