WIRED ON FRIDAY: Anyone who registers a Web address must provide the registrar with personal information, most of which is available for public viewing.

The days of the virtual real estate Wild West, where some domain names were as valuable as gold dust, are long over. It is hard to believe that, in January 2000, Bank of America paid $3 million (€3.45 million) for domain name www.loans.com.

The introduction of new top-level domain names has meant that having your website's name end in '.com' no longer carries the weight it once did. Whereas Network Solutions (now Verisign) operates the .com, .org and .net top-level domain names, other top-level domains such as .biz, .info and .name are now available through other companies.

There is nothing to stop anyone registering a site just to hold onto it, whether they intend to use it or not. Anyone who registers a Web address must also provide the company that handles the registration with a name, address, telephone number and e-mail address.

There are about 93 registrars worldwide: these are the companies that register Web addresses on people's behalf. At the end of 2001, individuals and businesses had registered 28.8 million Web addresses. Most of this information is available for public viewing via the Whois database.

The fact that this personal information is so freely available online has become a matter of debate.

Some people or companies who register websites do not like the idea of their personal data showing up for anyone who chooses to view them. In addition, as a source of additional revenue, registrars may sell this information to marketing companies.

The centralised Whois database can be accessed through the websites of most registrars. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) oversees the domain-name system.

ICANN requires full Whois information, but not everyone is truthful when giving details. There is nothing to stop someone from putting down a fictitious name, address and even credit card number.

New York-based Register.com, the second-largest registrar after Network Solutions, went live in June 1999. In the past quarter, it had a total of 3.3 million domain names under management.

"As a policy, when someone registers a domain name in our database it automatically gets dumped into the Whois database," said Lisette Zarnowski, a public relations executive at Register.com.

However, the company does sell an account-masking product to corporations, which means that companies can disguise the fact that they are behind a new name or product. In that instance, register. com becomes the contact name in the Whois database.

Network Solutions used to have the exclusive rights to domain-name registration. But, three years ago, as the internet grew, ICANN opened registration to competition. As a registry, Verisign still looks after the overall Whois database. As a registrar, it still manages sites that end with .com, .net and .org, of which there are 13.6 million.

According to Miriam Sapiro, director of international policy at Verisign in Washington D.C., Verisign's global name registry, Whois Web service, operates to terms of a contract it signed with ICANN.

This contract was revised last spring and part of it obliges Verisign to design and develop a universal Whois service, an even more comprehensive database of domain-name holders.

Unlike the current Whois database, which does not include all of the new domain extensions, such as .info, .biz or those assigned to specific countries, of which there are 243 (including .ie and .co.uk), the universal Whois database would mean someone could search for any domain name.

Universal Whois would allow public access and effective use of Whois across all registries and top-level domain names, including country codes, and generic top-level domain names like .com, .net, .info (which is managed by a consortium called Afilias) and .biz, which is managed by NeuLevel.

Ms Sapiro said it is "an ambitious" research and development project that began last September. Verisign began consultations with key users of the Whois database. It is running three meetings that are open to everyone and it is continuing to have informal meetings to incorporate feedback into the draft document.

we are committed to try to achieve implementation of universal Whois by December 31St., 2002," Ms Sapiro said.