With standard registration, the site is registered to you with ICANN. With private registration, it is registered to your registrar and you are provided access. Whois will show their info.

Note that this means you are technically not the owner of the domain, and you may be limited in your ability to transfer it, sell it, or do other things with it. Permissions are limited to what the registrar allows instead of what ICANN allows, although in most cases they give you nearly full control. You'll just have to read their terms if you want to know what you can do with it.

> Note that this means you are technically not the owner of the domain, and you may be limited in your ability to transfer it, sell it, or do other things with it.

This is a myth. ICANN has published requirements on how private registrations must operate; ownership of the domain always goes to the paying owner, not the registrar.

That's interesting. Do you know where the requirements are published? I've read language recently from at least one registrar specifically stating that private registration prevents transfers to other registrars. Maybe this was before these new requirements were published.

In my recent experience, private registration prevents transfers because you are unable to receive the email message that contains the code you need to complete the transfer. I am still able to transfer my domains, but I need to turn off private registration first, so the email is sent to my real email address. This seems like a silly problem, and one that the registrars cold solve if they wanted to, but obviously they don't.

I have transferred multiple domains with the privacy service turned on. No problem whatsoever. Every registrar worth doing business with (i.e. not GoDaddy) will forward all important mail to your real email address. Emails can take a few minutes or hours to get forwarded and/or end up in the spam folder, but that's about it.

If your registrar's privacy service is so bad that emails don't get through, transfers should be the least of your worries. Because of the new ICANN verification rules, you're at risk of losing your domain if emails don't get through to you.

I believe some of the registrars provide a rolling email address on your whois info, which forwards the mails to your inbox. But the address is changing at intervals, therefore if anybody scraped the address it won't be of use.

Registration without revealing your private information in the whois database. Providers usually put their own details there and forward emails to the end user.

Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.

> Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.

And yet other TLD registries are sensible enough to make privacy the default for private individuals. .EU isn't bad in this regard, and others like .SE even go so far as to hide your name (most only hide your postal, email, telephone)

Frankly I don't know why anyone who can avoid it would want to touch Verisign TLDs with a barge pole... they have the continued gall to keep putting their prices up despite more competition than ever, and fail to raise the bar on basics like whois protection. Even .UK domains can be had for $5/year with registry level whois protection for heavens sake.

.us for example prohibits it.

If you don't have private registration a whois query on the domain shows the public your name and address. If you do it shows some nominee company instead.

For example https://who.is/whois/habinow.com is one of mine that is private

while https://who.is/whois/ycombinator.com is pubic and shows Nicholas Sivo as the admin and an address and phone number for y combinator

It's an add-on service that domain registrars offer which hides your personal information from the public.

When you register a domain, it's a requirements that you list contact information publicly. Companies usually don't mind doing this but many people don't want to list their home address and phone number for the world to see. Private registration lists a proxy company's information as the contact for the domain and they forward the information to you.