Security researchers are frustrated that they need to pay money to learn details about domain names ending in .name, as reported in today's Wired News, but the company in charge says the policy doesn't stymie security researchers and protects anonymous internet speech.

Hakon Haugnes, the founder and president of the Global Name Registry, the company that oversees the .name Top Level Domain, said via an email after the story ran that the controversial policy is a compromise between ICANN's older Whois lookup policy and the European Union's Data Protection Act.

It is an important principle in the [EU Data Protection] Act that people should be able to register for the service without thereby disclosing their private information. At the same time, we and others want to ensure that people violating laws and policies can be tracked down and sites taken down when required.