As the registrant. With privacy protection enabled, a public lookup returns the service provider's details rather than the registrant's own, which reduces spam, cold solicitation and the risk of data leakage.
As the brand owner. That same privacy protection is the first obstacle to enforcement. Without a way to identify the holder directly, it becomes harder to pin down who is behind the infringement, to decide who to address a letter to, and to name the right defendant.
There are ways through. In a domain dispute proceeding, the provider will require the registrar to disclose the holder's details. In litigation, the court can be asked to obtain them from the registrar. And peripheral leads — the website recordal record, payment channels, contact details on the page — can be cross-checked against each other. The strengthening of data protection rules in recent years has further reduced what a public lookup yields, and that trend runs against rights holders.
On discovering an infringing domain, preserve the page content and the lookup results as evidence at once: both the registration data and the page can change at any time.
