Having a public register that tells you who owns a particular domain or IP address could be useful for a lot of things. Sure, they could take away a lot of fields that are not necessary and might be a privacy problem, like address and phone number, today it's useless, and maybe instead add a GPG public key, so much useful, and keep name and email address.<p>But don't remove it, it's a useful thing I use a lot, most of the times for security purpose, you see a suspicious IP address or domain while observing a packet capture, WHOIS tells you who owns it, you find in a log an IP address that tries to bruteforce into your server, WHOIS tells you who it is and gives you an address to contact and ask explanations, you need to find a person to contact if you have a problem with a website, contact the email address in the WHOIS record of the domain, you are sure that you are contacting the right person, even if the site gets hacked in the worst way the WHOIS record can't change.