'Whois protection service'

[Mark Foster <blakjak () blakjak net>]

Hi folks.
Don't post a lot here but i'm figuring you folks will know more about this
than my local NOG...

When investigating a host that spammed me today, I noted that when I
whois'd the domain that the mailserver involved has forward/reverse dns
pair for, the domain whois information comes up as follows:

Found crsnic referral to whois.enom.com.


Registration Service Provided By: Registerfly.com
Contact: support () registerflysupport com
Visit: http://www.RegisterFly.com

Domain name: xmux.com

Registrant Contact:
   RegisterFly.com - Ref# 14155933
   Whois Protection Service - ProtectFly.com (14155933.fly () spamfly com)


I'm unsure how appropriate it is to post anything more specific in the
open forum, but i've never seen this before. Whats the deal with hiding a
domain name owners true identity?
Is this not simply yet another protect-the-spammers mechanism?

I followed up the chain - the authoritive DNS servers for the domain in
question are hosts within a different domain, and this also has the same
protection engaged....

Is this old hat or something new? Is this still conformant to standard
.com/net registrant rules and regs? (here in .nz, the registry information
is required to be current and valid, and i've never seen a Registrar pass
itself off as the owner of a domain before (at least in any legitimate
situation))

Thanks in advance,
Mark.