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About Privacy/Proxy Registration Service

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Privacy Services – Privacy services allow a domain name holder (registrant) to be listed as the registrant of record but with alternate, valid contact information (such as a mail-forwarding service address) published in place of the registrant's home address.

Proxy Services – Proxy services allow a domain name to keep certain identity and contact details from appearing in public Whois information. The proxy service becomes the registered name holder of record, and its identity and contact information is displayed in Whois data.

The complaints ICANN will process regarding privacy and proxy services depends upon the version of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) between ICANN and the registrar. The ICANN-Accredited Registrars page lists the RAA version for every registrar.

2001 and 2009 RAAs

Privacy and proxy services are outside the scope of the 2001 RAA and 2009 RAA. To determine who is involved in a domain name behind a proxy or privacy service, please refer to the service provider's terms of service. If you have a complaint involving a law or regulation, you may want to refer the matter to the appropriate law enforcement agency within your jurisdiction or seek legal counsel.

2013 RAA

The 2013 RAA requires that privacy and proxy service providers:

  • Disclose service terms (including pricing), on its website and/or registrar's website and abide by such terms;
  • Publish an abuse/infringement point of contact;
  • Disclose the business contact information on its website and/or registrar's website; and
  • Publish and abide by terms of service and description of procedures on its website and/or registrar's website, such as handling of abuse or trademark infringement reports, communication handling, conditions of ending service, Whois data publication conditions, and access to support services.

If you have a complaint regarding one of these four items, please submit a Privacy/Proxy Registration Complaint Form.

Learn more about Privacy/Proxy Whois Inaccuracy.

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."