ICANN corporation allowed four more European companies to make changes to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. These are French companies GANDI SAS and IP Twins SAS, and also CPS-Datensysteme GmbH and Hostserver GmbH from Germany. All the changes concern the article that makes a registrar save all the information about previous registrants for two years. This article violates the law of the majority of EU countries, where it is forbidden to store personal data for more than a year.
When ICANN was still working on the new Registrar Accreditation Agreement in 2013, experts warned that this article would lead to many problems, however for some reason ICANN management insisted upon applying two-year period of data storage for registrants. It resulted in many complaints filed by European registrars, supported by opinion letters of respected independent lawyers. Under their influence ICANN corporation agreed to change the period of data storage to one year on exceptional basis for European registrars that filed requests. Since that moment the list of exceptions is regularly growing, every month it becomes more and more impressive.
