Nicholas Lee wrote:
I think if its possible its worth trying to increase the entry cost to access of the information. In some cases this might increase the transactional cost of current users, but that's life. After all people complain about speed limits all the time.
Why not just tell the .nz whois server to hand out the number to an SMS responder? That'd take care of the added-cost and prevent bulk harvesting, plus keep a record of who queries the whois. Everyone has mobiles, so it wouldn't require any investment in client-side technology. If you want to ratchet it up a notch, you could always have the whois server give out the phone number to a real live person at InternetNZ, for manual querying. I'm sure the telcos would love to run such a system. -- Juha