ICANN has filed injunction proceedings in a Bonn district court against EPAG, a Germany-based registrar that is part of the Tucows Group, over EPAG’s decision to stop collecting administrative and technical contact information when selling new domain name registrations, Domain Name Wire reports.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect last Friday, precludes the publication of personal information of domain name registrants in WHOIS. ICANN had to amend its contracts with registries and registrars to stop them from publishing this information. However, ICANN contractually requires that these data be collected and stored. ICANN pointed out that those with legitimate purposes, including security-related purposes, law enforcement, intellectual property rights holders, and other legitimate users of that information, must have access to full WHOIS records.
EPAG argues that the collection and storage of WHOIS data would be contrary to GDPR requirements. ICANN has filed a lawsuit to clarify that difference in interpretation. Many observers believe that EPAG and ICANN are using this as a test case. ICANN does not intend to fleece EPAG but only wants European courts to create a precedent for aligning the GDPR and WHOIS regulations because all the attempts to do this through negotiations in the past year have failed.
