How to hide complete domain information?

Question

I came across a domain name pagalworld.to. When I try to pull whois details for this domain I do not get any information from whois providers and I tried on multiples. How he did it?

Answer 1

This registry does not provide a detailed whois output:

$ whois -h whois.tonic.to pagalworld.to
Tonic whoisd V1.1
pagalworld ns1.serverhide.com
pagalworld ns2.serverhide.com

IANA whois server also says for .to:

remarks:      Registration information: http://www.tonic.to/

If you go there and read their FAQ you can see:

Does Tonic offer a whois service ?

Tonic does not maintain a whois database that provides registrant information, as many of our customers consider the public display of this information invasive of their privacy. In fact, we will never sell a mailing list of our customers.

We also do have a web-based facility similar to whois, that lists DNS and other domain name info, without revealing the customer name. Try for instance: http://www.tonic.to/whois?best.to. There is also a whois server on port 43 of whois.tonic.to.

To verify your .TO domain names are available worldwide, you can use a tool like nslookup or dig.

If you try with your domain you get marginally more data than from command line:

Domain:               pagalworld.to
Created on:           Thu Jan 02 05:36:21 2020
Last edited on:       Fri Feb 07 04:01:40 2020
Expires on:           Sat Jan 02 05:36:21 2021
Primary host add:     None
Primary host name:    ns1.serverhide.com
Secondary host add:   None
Secondary host name:  ns2.serverhide.com

END

So in short, the registry either does not handle contacts at all (called a thin registry, exactly like .COM today) or never outputs them in public API whatsoever.

This all boils down to the fact that each TLD is free to implement whatever business rules it wants, also based on its own local rules. Only gTLDs are under contract with ICANN and hence have some requirements.

So there is no "Whois Privacy" here (a very bad naming in fact, even if everyone uses it), but it is true that in many TLDs and specially in gTLDs, registrars will offer, or sell, a Privacy option in order not to send the real contact data to the registry and hence the registry whois server will never be able to output real contact. What you can or can not do or hide depends on the TLD and which registrar you use, so in all generic way your question can not be answered. The above is just an explanation about the specific .to case you gave.

PS: "When I try to pull whois details for this domain I do not get any information from whois providers and I tried on multiples"

1) when you say so in a question, you should list which "whois providers" you did try

2) but in fact you should try none, only the registry (as above) and if the registry has registrars then only the whois server of the registrar, not any other one.