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The Whois public database of domain name registration details is dead.
In a letter [PDF] sent this week to DNS overseer ICANN, Europe's data protection authorities have effectively killed off the current service, noting that it breaks the law and so will be illegal come 25 May, when GDPR comes into force.
The letter also has harsh words for ICANN's proposed interim solution, criticizing its vagueness and noting it needs to include explicit wording about what can be done with registrant data, as well as introduce auditing and compliance functions to make sure the data isn't being abused.
ICANN now has a little over a month to come up with a replacement to the decades-old service that covers millions of domain names and lists the personal contact details of domain registrants, including their name, email and telephone number.
ICANN has already acknowledged it has no chance of doing so: a blog post by the company in response to the letter warns that without being granted a special temporary exemption from the law, the system will fracture.
[...] Critics point out that ICANN has largely brought these problems on itself, having ignored official warnings from the Article 29 Working Party for nearly a decade, and only taking the GDPR requirements seriously six months ago when there has been a clear two-year lead time.
One company that is caught in the middle of the dispute is sanguine about the possible death of the service. "Is this the end of public Whois? Yes, in its current form," CEO of Irish registrar Blacknight, Michele Neylon told us. "But is it going to go completely dark? No."
Neylon has long complained about ICANN's refusal to acknowledge European law when it comes to the Whois service: back in 2013, he refused to sign an updated version of the contract that domain name sellers have with ICANN until it gave him a legal waiver over its data retention requirements.
"That decision probably cost us money, but if we have to choose between operating legally or illegally our path is clear," he wrote in a blog post this week.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Sunday April 15 2018, @10:39AM
The technical contact is supposed to contactable by any other admin on the Internet in case of network problems. The Internet was supposed to be a decentralized network without a few huge overlords.
There is nothing in this that stops the technical contact from being contactable - you just send an email to the listed pseudonymous redirection address.
What this stops is organisations harvesting contact information for profit. If you want to know who the technical contact is, rather than their role, then that's when you'll need a reason that stands up in (ultimately) a court of law.
If you don't like it, you don't have to use the domains that enforce this. You can choose to use only domains that make people's private information available to all for free.