​ICANN Makes Last Minute WHOIS Changes to Address GDPR Requirements

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The Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) struggled and sweated and with days left came up with a way to make the Domain Name System (DNS) and WHOIS, the master database of who owns what website name, compliant with the European Union (EU)’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

We’ll see.

It doesn’t appear to me that ICANN’s “Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data” will pass muster with the GDPR Article 29 working party, the GDPR enforcement group.

ICANN had wanted a year of grace to address WHOIS’s data privacy problems. They didn’t get it.

ICANN argued, “Unless there is a moratorium, we may no longer be able to … maintain WHOIS. Without resolution of these issues, the WHOIS system will become fragmented … A fragmented WHOIS would no longer employ a common framework for generic top-level domain (gTLD) registration directory services.”

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