Interestingly, when discussing WHOIS with my networking students, I discovered .edu WHOIS is not (cannot?) hidden. I suppose EDUCAUSE either requires WHOIS to remain open or they do not offer information hiding.
Doing some WHOIS lookups, we found a point of contact at a university, called the network admin said hello and launched into an impromptu network admin interview. It was cool stuff. I emailed him later in the day to apologize to and thank him for being a good sport about the whole thing. He (fortunately) found it all rather enjoyable.
Some other TLDs, like .us and .in, also forbid WHOIS privacy. TLD owners are free to set whatever policy they want around this. Perhaps .edu does the same.
It's useful for checking if a domain name is taken without doing that through a registrar, which is both less convenient, and (in case of shitty registrars) can be sold to domain speculators.
Both give you a way to find out the domain's registrar, registration date, transfer status, and administrative contacts like abuse@. Nameserver data can also be somehow useful.
Otherwise, what did you expect the registrar to divulge to you, a random passer-by?
As an Australian, I can look up the ownership of random properties in the US for free. But if I want to do the same for a building on my own street, I have to pay a US$11 fee per a property searched.
The US has a reputation of being a hypercapitalist society, yet they seem to be behind Australia in the descent into hypercapitalism by not (yet) privatising the registration of land titles. [0]
Considering Australia (SA) invented the concept of the Torrens Title which means that we don't have to pay extra to protect a piece of paper, and that the Titles Office has always charged for access to titles, I don't think that this is the "hypercapitalism" hill to die on.
It also means that banks can't sell mortgages out from under their borrowers because all liens and other finanacial liabilities attached to a title are known.
It doesn’t because you can negotiate a bulk discount. If you want all the titles, they’ll sell that to you - for a huge fee, but still a big discount off paying for them all individually. So essentially it prevents mass scraping by individuals and small businesses, while posing no real obstacle for megacorps with megabudgets