[dns-operations] Denying Whois DB by GeoIP

[Jim Reid]

> On 10 Jun 2017, at 02:51, Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.email> wrote:
> 
> You might also consider the decades of research that has gone into demonstrating that spammers don't bother harvesting e-mail address from whois data. They have so many more cheap and easy sources that it's simply not worth it to them. Absent that as a motivation, one wonders what the benefit of rate-limiting whois data is in the first place.

The benefits of rate-limiting whois lookups would be obvious if one had worked at a TLD registry.

For instance, drop-catchers are known to make zillions of whois lookups to find out when domain names expire. Other scumbags in the registrar business do this to mount phishing attacks at renewal time. Now these botttom feeders could swamp the registry with EPP queries. But many don’t. They just use whois to harvest that data.