So it will hopefully harm cogents business and customers will move away. Corporations only understand the bottom line.

If you're already a cogent customer, you're unlikely to drop Cogent because they spam. There's costs and risks associated with onboarding new transits, and (one of) your current providers being spammy to other people isn't generally likely to drive a business decision.

If you're not a cogent customer, you're either not going to become one because of their tactics, or you are going to become one because of their tactics. I guess it's working towards the latter given how long it's been going on for.

> "I think this is the wrong approach. The data is public."

But why should the registration data be in the public domain?

I don't publish my name/address/phone number in a phone book (remember those?) for obvious reasons. My domain registration info shouldn't be any different.

'No privacy' shouldn't be the default setting, with the customer having to pay extra for 'private' registration.

The reason that the RIRs operate whois databases for IP address assignments is so that in the event of a network misconfiguration or error, responsible parties can be emailed or even called on the phone quickly to resolve problems.

This is how the system has worked for a long time, and the data has always been public. It doesn't get abused much, despite and including Cogent's recent spam to the emails that appear there.

Regardless of how you think it should work in the future, this is how it works today. The data is 100% public now. It has been published. The cat is out of the bag.

Blocking Cogent from accessing their WHOIS service will not un-publish the data, and will not prevent those same humans from retrieving the (again, entirely public) information from a different IP range.

> This is how the system has worked for a long time, and the data has always been public. It doesn't get abused much, despite and including Cogent's recent spam to the emails that appear there.

It gets abused plenty (I get tonnes of spam to an email address that is published nowhere and is used for nothing except the RIPE whois db), and Cogent's spam is anything but recent. Cogent has been doing this for over a decade.

I expect spammers to be spammy. I expect reputable companies to behave in a reputable way.

Cogent sales people do their best to ensure that nobody confuses Cogent for a reputable company.

> But why should the registration data be in the public domain?

Because IPs are a finite and non-sharable resource and if there is an issue with some IP address, there needs to be a point of contact that anyone on the network can access.

Since the network is public, that contact information is public.

This is not about domain registration data. This is IP/AS registration data, which is very different and not something anyone can just buy for $8.95/year.

Yeah, in some cases, it's free. I have a /24 block registered and don't pay anything for it. It is a legacy registration from 1993.

It's a historical accident. IP registration information has been public for decades. The 80's internet was a friendlier place. Spam was unheard of.

It isn't a spam filter. It is a violation of a contractual agreement regarding PII that happened to manifest as spam.

Agreed. I prefer the approach of e.g. .se who have removed all sensitive data from whois and did so long before GDPR even. While it is a bit more work to reach out to domain holders now it is not like it was easy before since people rarely checked the email addresses which they used to register domains.

I wish registrars allowed you to set the details you want published in whois before they put them in (at least mine doesn't). Hours after buying a domain I started getting spam on a very private email, one which I only used for services I pay for. Sure enough I found my account email in the whois details, luckily I was able to quickly change it before more bots got hold of it.

I work on a registrar and I think the registries are much to blame here. Sure, the registrars should definitely improve their UIs to allow for better control over what is displayed in the whois information but since every registry have their own set of weird rules for domain contact details it is unnecessarily hard for us.

And I wish every registry was as sensible as .se and cared as much about the privacy of domain owners as .se does.