Here is something that I found pretty interesting while digging around this morning. I had noticed the domain name Anchor.org, which very likely sold at BuyDomains.com and has transferred to a new owner. I wasn’t able to find a sales price btw, but while doing the research on the domain, I ran into something that was surprising to me.
When I did a whois search at DomainTools for Anchor.org, the domain did NOT have Privacy on it? Whois Privacy is Free at Google Domains. Since it is free, I assumed privacy was a default on? I also questioned if you even had the option to turn it off or not?
With those two questions in mind, that is why it was a little shocking to even see Anchor.org with no whois privacy as shown below in the screenshot I just took via DomainTools:
Just to make sure, I visited another whois service, Who.is and checked Anchor.org and guess what? They show whois privacy on the domain Anchor.org?
Did one service “grab” the data before the other? Mainly DomainTools grabbing an early data set before privacy was “turned on”? Could have been, but is really hard to say. Both whois services show “fresh data” as both show today’s date (7/1/2014).
Since Google Domains is in beta, they clearly can have some minor issues like this, but it’s odd that one whois service is showing privacy data and the other is not. The other question is, does Google Domains even allow you to turn whois privacy on or off? All domains to this point that I have checked, all had whois privacy on, so this lead me to believe that it wasn’t an option to turn off whois privacy. I would assume Google would give its customers the option to turn it off or on, but it’s clearly odd that whois data is showing two different results for one domain, both checked seconds apart.
Update: I was able to duplicate this with another Anthony Casalena domain name, ANTHONYCASALENA.ORG with exact results, so it doesn’t appear to be happening with “one domain” but it does appear to be happening with this user! Anthony Casalena is the founder of Squarespace Inc. btw
