For .com delayed 6 months — Thick Whois
Deadline pushed back thanks to contract negotiations and GDPR.
ICANN’s Board has agreed to delay enforcement of thick whois in .Com, .Net and .Jobs by six months due primarily to concerns over the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
These domains are due to switch from a “thin Whois” to “thick Whois” for fresh registrations in May 2018. This means that instead of the registrar being the source for registrant and contact information, the registrars will pass this information to Verisign instead. Whois queries will call Verisign instead of the registrar.
Registrars asked for a delay implementing this for two reasons. First, Verisign is changing the contract with them to allow for thick whois and negotiations of these terms are ongoing. Second, all parties in the domain ecosystem are figuring out how to handle the EU’s GDPR.
ICANN agreed to a six-month delay of enforcement, so the fresh deadline for thick Whois for fresh registrations of these domains is October 28, 2018. The deadline to transition existing domain registrations in these extensions to thick Whois is the end of July 2019.
