Is impacting Whois in the European Union — How GDPR

CENTR releases data on how ccTLD managers are treating Whois under GDPR.

The European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has had a big impact on the domain name business, particularly with the display of domain ownership information in WHOIS. While the long arm statutes of the law mean registries and registrars around the world must pay attention, European country code managers must be even more careful.

Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), an association for country code domain managers in Europe, published survey results today regarding how ccTLD managers are handling the law.

This chart shows how the ccTLDs handle collecting data and presenting it in Whois:

There is also a big difference between which data points within the contact types are published in Whois. For example, only 11% of the registries publish an individual registrant’s email address. 47% publish the email address if it’s a corporate registrant.

It’s worth noting that many EU ccTLD managers by now had restricted Whois information prior to GDPR in order to conform with local laws.

The note can be downloaded here.