Domain Name WHOIS Information Will No Longer Show Contact Information

Recently, the European Union has officially started implementing a new privacy protection act, the “General Data Protection Regulations,” which is deeply affecting the technology industry.

According to the regulations, all services provided to users in the European Union must strictly abide by their privacy policies, otherwise, they will face huge fines and other penalties. The domain name information query by default shows the details of the domain name holder, such as the name and contact telephone number provided by the domain name holder when registering the domain name.

Content Based on General Data Protection Regulations, ICANN is actively adjusting registrant privacy information.

ICANN has announced this month the “Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data” which requires adjustments to the information publicly displayed by WHOIS.

That is when the registrar provides the WHOIS query service, the registrant, management contact, and technical contact’s personal data provided by the domain name holder are no longer displayed.

The new provisional policy rules are to adapt to the Regulations of the General Data Protection Regulations. Only the registrar and the expiration date will be displayed when the domain name registration information is queried.

For the domain name holders, the new universal data protection regulations will also bring new benefits, that is, domain names may no longer need to pay for privacy protection functions.

The privacy protection function was originally intended to hide the public information of domain name holders, and now the domain name industry also has to comply with the general data protection regulations.

Based on this original disclosure of WHOIS information hiding, it naturally no longer needs the privacy protection function, nor does it need to worry about the leakage of its own information.