I have four domain names registered to my name that are my legal name. Two generic and two country code domains. I never hosted any services on them. I registered them so that no one else could. I did the same with Twitter for example. I made an account, but I don’t use it. I did this to guard against impersonation, and to reserve the name in case I decide I want to use it myself.
Even though I never hosted a website on any of these domains, they still ended up in IA’s Wayback Machine. But all they got are snapshots of parked domain web pages with my name on them, a few for each domain. How is that for “our cultural heritage” or “public interest”? At this rate, the distinction between “IA” and “AI” is increasingly a blur, just like the acronyms – get the letter order wrong and change the meaning. And what do they mean by “our” cultural heritage? Who appointed IA as the cultural preserver for my country? I’m not a US citizen. But my name is now part of American cultural heritage! Hah!
For a library whose stated mission is to preserve history and cultural heritage, there is close to zero historical value in archiving web pages for parked domain names at random. On the contrary, it’s a waste of resources, and I would not want to learn that any donations I make toward such a project are wasted on this type of “content” that somehow preserves “our cultural heritage”.
Do they ever honor delete requests from physical/natural persons for any reason whatsoever? Are they in fact stubborn hardliners like Archive dot Today? I don’t want no EXCLUSION, I want complete erasure, or I won’t bother with it – I don’t want to add to more permanency by having them add my domains to their internal exclusion file.
I have done some reading on this topic – on this site and on Reddit – and I’m seeing a lot of arguments but no consensus on whether or not they must comply with such requests, or how it may be enforced. I am a EU citizen and my personal information is protected under GDPR. But some people argue that GDPR has no bearing on IA, because they are a legal entity in the US, and outside of EU jurisdiction. And therefore they get a free pass? I am somewhat familiar with GDPR, and as far as I know, it doesn’t matter what country my personal information is being processed in, the GDPR still applies. There is even a framework for co-operation between EU and US, regarding privacy and data transfers.
It’s interesting to see how this turned out. I definitely took lessons from all of this. For starters, I should not have relied on DNS servers provided by the domain registrars.
I knew this could happen, so I tried to avoid this situation by disabling the domain parking with my registrars. But I used Namecheap for the generic domains, and their DNS control panel was buggy and the system unpredictable. I would disable domain parking and see it gone, only to find they re-enabled it hours or days later.
I used the easy DNS settings page (templates), and I also tried using the advanced DNS settings page to manually clear out records that they were adding. My domains kept getting un-parked and re-parked. I had to contact their support team to get a stop to this. Then it was good for a few years, but in 2025, the domains must have been parked again, without my knowledge. Because that’s one of the years when Wayback Machine took snapshots.
When I check these domains now, they are not parked, and I haven’t been doing anything with them, other than renewing them. So my guess is that it was some temporary glitch or a sysetm migration at Namecheap that triggered it, and Wayback Machine crawled those pages while they were up again. There are snapshots from other years too, but tese were the most recent, when none of my domains should have been parked – when I had that all worked out with the registrar, or so I thought.
But I have to say, Namecheap is not the only registrar with a buggy DNS control panel. I have used and switched between three different domestic registrars for my two country code domains, and one of them is to blame for repeatedly parking my domains. Similarly, I had to contact their support team to get a stop to it. Their DNS control panel is maybe even worse than that of Namecheap. They have a poor quality customer dashboard overall.
I actually took up a new registrar for my country code domains this month. They are a 6 years old startup company, and they have a polished and modern dashboard – it’s super responsive and reliable, and they recently rebuilt it with deep integration of AI for automated administration and support (for good and for worse). But parking my domain is one of the first things they did within days after I transferred in. I have disabled domain parking since, and the new settings stick – at least for now. I believe it’s common practice for registrars to park a new domain that’s not in use for anything else. But in my experience, they sometimes seem to intentionally undo your settings if you say no to parking. So I will be moving my DNS to a trustworthy DNS provider.
As for Internet Archive, I still have not sent them a request. If all they will do is exclude it from Wayback Machine, I will not bother with it. Since the domain name itself is my name, and the snapshots contain my name, and I own the domain name, I don’t see why they would not honor a delete request. I see no good reason for them to be archiving web pages for parked domain names. That’s like picking up garbage and keeping it, just for the hell of it. There is no curation or quality checks. I guess the saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” applies here too.