I Am Completely Serious

Link Removal Request

From: Keith Terrell (Keith.Terrell@melbourneit.com.au)

To: sarahpin.com@respectmyprivacy.com

Hello,

We recently reviewed all the links pointing to the MelbourneIT website, and found that you currently have link/s to us on your website, sarahpin.com.

While we appreciate your support, our online marketing team has requested that the links listed below be removed if possible, as they no longer

comply with the guidelines set out by the various search engines.

The page/s of your website that we found links on are:

http://www.sarahpin.com/2008/07/19/recent-researches-why-yahoo-private-domain-registration-is-not-private/

We appreciate your time in reviewing this. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any problems locating the links.

Kind regards,
Keith

They just tried to charge me for a domain they don’t manage again.

Fortunately, this time through I’d erased my debit card number from Yahoo Wallet. (I had to use it to renew my Flickr a couple months ago, but I remembered to erase it again afterwards.) Not having anything to charge, they instead sent me a “Past-Due Payment Notice” demanding $35. For the domain I transferred last year!

(For those who don’t feel like clicking the link, the last time this happened they just charged me without warning, and I had to contest it on PayPal to get the money back - because, since I don’t actually have an account with Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo Small Business customer service won’t talk to me.)

To summarize Yahoo’s domain registration behavior thus far:

1) Yahoo offers a “private registration” option, which allows you to keep your real name and mailing address out of the WHOIS database. It is impossible to transfer one of these private domains to another registrar. Ever. (See my post from last year, or this guy’s post from 2007.)

To effect a transfer, you have to downgrade the domain to a non-private one, thus revealing your personal information. This means that if, for any reason, you’re in a position in which you can’t allow your real name and address to become public - say: you’re being stalked, you’ve expressed certain uncomplimentary ideas about your employer on your blog, you’re a Venezuelan political dissident, you’re an oil industry whistle blower, you’ve converted to Islam or Linux or come to some conclusions about your sexual orientation and your grandmother is an Old Regular Baptist Microsoft project manager who’s waiting in line for a heart transplant - you can’t leave Yahoo for another registrar.

2) According to this blogger, Yahoo will also expose your real name and address if you allow your domain registration to expire.

So, if for some reason you can’t allow your real name into WHOIS, you also can’t cancel a privately registered Yahoo domain.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

The short version of this post: If you’ve ever had and then canceled web hosting/domain registration/etc. with Yahoo, you probably want to go in and remove all your billing information, just in case.

The long version:

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

In short:

It’s not possible to either transfer or cancel a domain registered this way without making your personal information public. Yahoo’s description of the service is dishonest about this.

At length:

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.

If you have any domains registered at Yahoo, you might want to move them - as of tomorrow, they’re apparently upping their yearly fee to $35. This is just for a basic .com domain with no special features. And they’re being sneaky about it.

(I’m really glad now that I invaded Former Employer and insisted I move their site to a different host last time I was home. If Yahoo decided to raise hosting prices, too, they probably wouldn’t have noticed until they’d started getting charged. As it is, I’m going to email them and ask if I should go ahead transfer their domain, too.)