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Iceland breaks ranks on Whois, will publish emails

Kevin Murphy, April 30, 2018, Domain Policy

Iceland’s ccTLD has become what I believe is the first registry to state that it will continue to publish email addresses in public Whois records after the General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect.
The move seems to put the registry, ISNIC, in direct conflict with the opinions of European data protection authorities.
The company said in a statement last week that after GDPR comes into effect May 25 it will stop publishing almost all personal information about .is registrants in the public Whois.
However, it broke ranks with other European ccTLDs and the likely ruleset for ICANN-regulated gTLDs, by saying it would not expunge email addresses:

ISNIC will however, at least for the time being, continue to publish email addresses, country and techincal information of all NIC-handles associated with .is domains. Those customers (individuals) who have recorded a personally identifiable email address, and do not want it published, will need to change their .is WHOIS email address to something impersonal.

Registrants will be able to opt in to having their full details published.
ISNIC appears to be taking a principled stand against the Draconian regulation. It said in a statement:

Assuming that GDPR directive applies fully to the “WHOIS” service provided for decades by most ccTLD registries, these new restrictions will lead to less transparency in domain registrations and less trust in the domain registration system in general. ISNIC, as many others, strongly disagrees with the view of the European parlament [sic] in this matter and warns that GDPR, as it is being implemented, will neither lead to better privacy nor a safer network environment.

It’s a surprising decision, given that privacy regulators have indicated that they agree that email addresses are personal data that should not be published.
The Article 29 Working Party told ICANN earlier this month that it “welcomed” a proposal to replace email addresses with anonymized emails or web-based contact forms.

Iceland yanks Islamic State domain

Kevin Murphy, October 13, 2014, Domain Registries

Iceland’s ccTLD operator has suspended one or more domain names affiliated with Islamic State, the terrorist group currently running riot in parts of Iraq and Syria.
ISNIC runs .is, which matches the IS acronym.
In a statement on its web site, the company said:

ISNIC has suspended domains that were used for the website of a known terrorist organisation. The majority of ISNIC’s board made this decision today, on the grounds of Article 9 of ISNIC’s Rules on Domain Registration, which states: “The registrant is responsible for ensuring that the use of the domain is within the limits of Icelandic law as current at any time.”
Never before has ISNIC suspended a domain on grounds of a website’s content.

The domain in question was reportedly khilafah.is, which had a web site titled “Khilafah #IS | Media Releases from Islamic State”. Khilafah is the Latin-script version of the Arabic word for Caliphate.
IS has previously been known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It’s current media practice here in the UK to call it “so-called Islamic State”.