Continue publishing most domain owner data — GoDaddy will
Registrar is more selective regarding which Whois records will be redacted in wake of GDPR.
With the GDPR deadline quickly approaching, the world’s largest domain name registrar has been mostly silent on its plans. Over the past week, I connected with GoDaddy (NYSE:GDDY) to understand what it plans to do to comply with the EU’s privacy law, especially as it relates to Whois.
Unlike many of its competitors, GoDaddy does not plan to redact Whois information for domain names registered by people outside of the EU. It will continue to publish contact information like it always has for web-based Whois searches. Since it has to redact information for EU residents, GoDaddy will no longer sell DomainsByProxy to people in the European Union but will continue to offer it to people in other regions. (Some countries are routed through others for purchasing due to common currencies and/or languages. For example, clients in Morocco are routed to GoDaddy’s France website. They will be treated like EU residents for purposes of Whois.)
GoDaddy’s decision doesn’t surprise me too much. GoDaddy was an early pioneer of Whois proxy services and has aggressively pushed the paid and high-margin product to its clients. I’m not sure how much money GoDaddy makes from DomainsByProxy but I imagine it’s significant.
Of course, GoDaddy won’t come out and say that Whois privacy revenue is the reason for its decision. SVP & GM – Domains, Kevin Doerr told Reglike:
There were many reasons we looked at keeping Whois the way it is globally. GoDaddy welcomes the privacy changes that come with GDPR, but we wanted to be thoughtful regarding impacting our global clients. So GoDaddy will closely monitor the impact of GDPR, as well as regulatory requirements from governments around the world, ahead of making decisions on how to evolve our privacy and Whois practices for every client.
Whatever the reasons, as a proponent of more public data, I’m in favor of GoDaddy’s decision.
GoDaddy will continue to restrict data on Port 43 lookups, still. Port 43 lookups will contain technical data, state and country only. This will apply to people who right now have whitelisted port 43 access, too.
GoDaddy has restricted Port 43 data since January to cut down on spam. The firm has been criticized for Port 43 blocking, but the final GDPR Whois spec from ICANN is essentially in line with what GoDaddy has by now done.
The net effect ought to be little to no spam for domain name registrants but people with a good reason to contact them will still be able to by performing individual Whois lookups on GoDaddy’s website.
Tucows, the world’s second-largest domain registration firm, has disclosed that it will treat all Whois records the same regardless of where the registrant is located. They will all be redacted.
