Austria to stop publishing most Whois data

Austrian ccTLD operator nic.at will no longer publish any Whois information for individual registrants, in order to comply with incoming EU privacy law.

“Natural persons’ data will no longer be published from mid-May 2018,” the company said today.

Data concerning legal entities such as companies will continue to be published, it added.

The move is of course an effort to become compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation, which currently has the industry scrambling around in the dark looking for ways avoid avoid millions of euros of potential fines.

nic.at will continue to collect the private data of individual registrants, but it will only publish technical information such as the name of the registrar and name servers in response to public Whois queries.

Companies will have their names and addresses published, but will have the option to have their email address and phone number hidden.

nic.at said it will disclose records to “law enforcement agencies, lawyers or people who contact nic.at following domain disputes and can prove that their rights have been infringed”.

People will be able to opt-in to having their information published

It’s arguably a more Draconian implementation of GDPR than the one proposed by ICANN for gTLDs, but it appears to be in line with plans already announced by Nominet for .uk and DENIC for .de.

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Tagged: .at, gdpr, ICANN, nic.at, privacy, whois