GoDaddy Sounds Alarm Over How India Law Would Upend Internet Privacy Everywhere

Source Domain: gizmodo.com

The internet is filled with fakes. A court in India is setting out to address the problem by requiring more transparency from domain registrars to make it easier to crack down on fraud. And while the intentions might be good, Reuters is reporting that major American domain registrar GoDaddy is sounding the warning bells that the court’s decision could fundamentally reshape the internet well beyond India’s borders.

Fraudulent domains have been an ongoing issue for India, which has increasingly seen its population become connected in recent years. According to Our World In Data, India went from 15% of its more than 1.46 billion residents having internet access in 2015 to 70% in 2025. That’s a huge leap in a short period of time, meaning there are a lot of people with limited knowledge of online literacy and best practices for cybersecurity. That makes those users a target of online fraud. The nation’s National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) reported identifying more than 1,100 phishing domains in the first quarter of 2025 alone, and new ones are cropping up all the time.

A lot of those fraudulent sites use big brands to try to trick visitors into engaging. That has led to a lot of lawsuits from major American companies, per Reuters, who have pushed courts and the government to block spoofed sites and typo-squatters who rely on mistyped URLs to trick people. But in an effort to be responsive to those companies, the Delhi High Court took things a step further and made it the domain registrar’s problem.

Late last year, the court that sits below the Supreme Court of India ruled that domain registrars can no longer offer domain buyers the ability to obscure their information as a default option—a common service offered to prevent people from being able to simply look up the name and personal information of a domain’s owner. Instead, buyers would have to manually opt in to privacy and potentially pay an additional fee for it. The…

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