The Whois public database of domain name registration details is dead.
In a letter [PDF] sent this week to DNS overseer ICANN, Europe's data protection authorities have effectively killed off the current service, noting that it breaks the law and so will be illegal come 25 May, when GDPR comes into force.
The letter also has harsh words for ICANN's proposed interim solution, criticizing its vagueness and noting it needs to include explicit wording about what can be done with registrant data, as well as introduce auditing and compliance functions to make sure the data isn't being abused.
ICANN now has a little over a month to come up with a replacement to the decades-old service that covers millions of domain names and lists the personal contact details of domain registrants, including their name, email and telephone number.
In the long term, what will this do to websites that currently use DNS lookups as one aspect of access controls?
What kind of information are you fetching?I don't personally take this approach, but would you still be able to look up 11.22.33.44 on the fly and verify that it is allocated to {authorized robot}?
