Registrars that won't hand over your details — the list, and what each one actually holds

This. Also the email must not be at the same company as domain, is one account then, not two.

Two month revision. Exit column added per old_growth_seo, "not published" rows honestly labelled per Ravenstack, and BingLoft dropped to a footnote rather than a row because keeping it in the table implied a comparison that doesn't exist.

Registrar	Registrant	Category 1 posture	Exit	Reported incidents
Njalla	Njalla	Nothing to disclose by design	Slow, manual, weeks	None reported, 3 members holding
1984	You	Iceland, no reports of informal disclosure	Normal auth code	None reported
OrangeWebsite	You	Iceland, no reports either way	Normal auth code	None reported
Virtualine	You	Unpublished, no reports	Normal auth code	None reported
BPServ	You	Claims email-only; VPS side has a suspension on record	Normal auth code	None on the registrar side

Every "reported incidents" cell says none, across five registrars and two months of asking. I don't read that as five clean records. I read it as the point made upthread: you find out a file was opened when somebody knocks, and people who get knocked on don't post about it.

If you have one, post it. Anonymously, without the domain, without the date if the date identifies you. A shape is worth more than nothing.

Five rows of "none reported" presented as a table still reads as five endorsements to anyone skimming. Consider not making it a column.

Disagree. Removing it hides the weakness of the evidence rather than showing it. The column is there to be embarrassing.

One thing worth adding to the Iceland rows that isn't about policy at all: both of those are small companies.

1984 and OrangeWebsite are not large operations, and small is a double-edged property here. Small means a request is likely to be read by someone who understands why the company exists, which is good. It also means there is no legal department to say no on your behalf, no documented escalation path, and if the two or three people who set the culture leave, the culture leaves.

I'd still recommend either of them. I'd recommend them as a company with good instincts rather than a company with a process, and those degrade differently.

Watched exactly this happen to a Panamanian registrar around 2017. Same people, same page, new owners, and the answer to a support email went from "no" to "certainly" inside a year. Nobody announced anything.

There is an incident on the board this week if the thread still wants one. A registrar supplied registrant details to a complainant on request, no order, no notice. Not one of the rows in your table, for what that's worth.

Seen it, and it's the first concrete category 1 report I've been able to point at in five months of asking.

The detail that matters for this list is the one people will skim past: the registrant had privacy enabled. It worked exactly as advertised — the public record showed the proxy — and it was irrelevant, because the request went to the company holding the file and the company answered it.

That is the whole thesis of the opening post, demonstrated at somebody else's expense. Published is not held.

One incident, secondhand, no name on the registrar. It supports the thesis. It isn't a row.

Correct. It's in the thread, not the table.

Leaving the incident discussion here rather than merging it into the other thread. Don't name the registrar without something to back it.

Half-year close-out, and I want to end it on the honest state rather than a recommendation.

Six months, five registrars in the table, one concrete incident and it happened somewhere not on the list. That is not enough evidence to rank anything, and if you came here for a winner you should leave with a framework instead.

The framework is three questions, in order:

1. Is there a file with your name in it? For exactly one option on this list the answer is no, and every other consideration is downstream of that.
2. What makes them open it? Not the court order — the email. That's the discretionary part and the part where companies differ.
3. Who will own the company in three years? Nobody knows, including them, and every promise in this thread is a promise from current management.

Everything else — price, TLD coverage, panel quality — is real but secondary. Re-read the dates before you trust any specific row.