Why the Public Directory of Domain Names Is About to Vanish

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Series Details 18.10.18
Publication Date 18/10/2018
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The WHOIS service has run into the legal landmine of European data regulation (GDPR), and highlighted the weakness of consensus-based internet governance in the face of the law. The WHOIS saga illustrated the adverse impact of GDPR on security and law enforcement.

Background

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was adopted by the European Union (EU) in April 2016 and took full effect on 25 May 2018 across the EU countries. Over 2017-18, ICANN consulted with contracted parties, European data protection authorities, legal experts, and interested governments and other stakeholders to understand the potential impact of the GDPR to Personal Data that is Processed by certain participants in the gTLD domain name ecosystem (including Registry Operators and Registrars) pursuant to ICANN policies and contracts between ICANN and such participants that are subject to the GDPR.

As a result a Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data was adopted in May 2018.

WHOIS is notan acronym - it is the system that asks the question, who is responsible for a domain name or an IP address?

Source Link https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/why-public-directory-domain-names-about-vanish
Related Links
ICANN: ICANN WHOIS https://whois.icann.org/en
EDPB: News, 05.07.18: Letter to ICANN https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2018/letter-icann_en

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