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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 15 2018, @04:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can't dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @07:44AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @07:44AM (#667195)

    Didn't some of us, the ones with a friggin' clue, warn everyone that handing the Internet over to the corrupt and insane U.N. would end badly?

    It's called 3 R's. Reading is part of that. Also, reading *comprehension* is important part of reading.

    You have so much bullshit in your one sentence it's quite unbelievable. First, you assume "Internet is run by UN". Secondly, you assume diplomats at UN are "insane". Then you accuse the entire body of UN of being corrupt. All without any proof. Then you assume that it is *you* that has any idea and that you are in the poor, minority of people that actually has an idea of how things should be for everyone because you are the only one with a "clue". Well, Mr. jmorris, you actually have no clue which means your statement is quite irrelevant.

    1. UN has nothing to do with internet
    2. The law is EU data privacy law
    3. UN is not "insane" - it's actually a very sane way of different nations to meet and talk to each other. Would you rather they don't talk at all?
    4. UN, the institution, is far less corrupt than many of its members. This is mainly because UN has no power and it's composed of nations that do not look past corruption that easily.
    5. ICANN doesn't want to test Europe's privacy laws.
    6. This is about Whois service.... which is kind of stupid these days. All you get is spam.

    So please, get a "clue". Read the RFCs,

    https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt [ietf.org]

    and then you can contact the people you want in case of problems with their domains.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @09:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @09:55AM (#667218)

    Damn!

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @03:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @03:06AM (#667475)

    Compliance to RFC 2142 is voluntary. Major operators including [archive.org] Google [zork.net] and Comcast [archive.org] flout it, or flouted it.