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Privacy and Internet Infrastructure

Certain bodies that manage and set technical standards for internet infrastructure are moving towards respecting human rights. Domain-name registration, for example, has taken significant steps towards meeting privacy rights; the private details of a domain name’s owner are now private by default, and are no longer searchable on the Whois database.

Domain-name servers, translate domain names into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in web browsers and other applications, also took steps forward for human rights in 2018. Usually, when a person queries a domain’s IP address, the query is carried out with no security; in 2018, however, software community Mozilla started to implement these queries securely in its Firefox browser. Making these queries private means that filtering and blocking by domain name is no longer possible.