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“Domain name sellers rub ICANN’s face in sticky mess of Europe’s GDPR,” Kieren McCarthy reporting in The Register. “Internet domain-name sellers have turned the tables on global DNS overseer ICANN by using its own tactics against the hapless organization. In a letter to the California-based organization sent the day before it finally approved a ‘temporary’ policy for the Whois service to bring it into compliance with new European privacy legislation—GDPR—registrars representing roughly a quarter of all domain names have asked for a ‘moratorium’ on the new policy. ... The ‘moratorium’ language is a direct reference to ICANN’s embarrassing efforts to excuse itself from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by asking European data protection authorities to grant it a special one-year exception before they applied the law: a request that the authorities pointed out they were in no position to grant.”
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So here is a German Registrar, Joker.com, inside the EU, with an independent website, stating clearly that proxy whois satisfies GDPR:
https://proxy-privacy.com
It also notes that not all registries (i.e. ccTLDs) will bow to the idea of moving to thin whois, thus suggests use of it’s service to make those whois records GDPR compliant.
So let me ask this again, why is 16 years of privacy whois development IGNORED as the logical solution to addressing GDPR? Why is a complete redesign being forced onto the industry? And yet a German registrar acknowledges it is a solution .....
It seems to me GDPR is actually being used as an excuse to eliminate whois, that is the intent. Otherwise why would ICANN not acknowledge, as Joker does, that Privacy Whois (turned on be default) addresses GDPR which saves EVERYBODY wasted effort and money reinventing the wheel?
The goal is to eliminate public whois and make it an “exclusive membership” service, the goal is NOT to satisfy GDPR.
The fact that satisfying GDPR is not the objective is whats causing is all problems and is what ICANN should be called out on. Default Privacy Whois satisfies GDPR, assuming its enabled by default (which is equivalent to thin whois) and is a rather trivial technical backend change.