GDPR went into effect last week. Even though GDPR is a European Union data protection and privacy regulation that does not cover Americans or other people who are not EU citizens, some domain registrars totally eliminated public Whois lookup information to ensure they do not violate GDPR regulations and potentially expose themselves to serious penalties.
I have found that some domain name registrars have not eliminated public Whois lookups and Whois information, and I want to share what I found with you. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of registrars, and as far as I can tell, Whois information is only publicly available for registrants who do not have a European presence. I used a combination of registrar Whois searches, ICANN whois searches, and DomainTools Whois searches to see which registrars are blocking information and which are still showing information.
I invite you to share the name of registrars that are not using something like “Data Protected” for Whois lookups as you find them.
Registrars still showing Whois information after GDPR implementation:
- BigRock
- CSC Corporate Domains, Inc.
- Dynadot
- GoDaddy
- MarkMonitor
- Moniker
- NameBright
- Network Solutions
- Register.com
- Uniregistry
It is important to keep in mind that there is a possibility that some of my Whois lookups were cached entries from prior to GDPR implementation. It is also possible a registrant opted out of GDPR blocking so their Whois information showed up publicly despite the registrar blocking this data for others. If I added a registrar that should not be on the list above, please let me know and I will remove the registrar from the list. In addition, I am sure I missed some registrars so please let me know if I missed any that should be added.
Thanks, Elliot. This is very helpful information.
glad to see some registrars have some sense.
Thanks for the list. Moniker can be added to this, at least at this moment. Been trying to track some of the big registrars on the GigaDomains.com blog.
Thanks. I added Moniker to the list.
It gets more complicated….You have to look up the domain’s info on the whois of the place it’s registered. Godaddy’s Whois will not show the info of Moniker domains, for example. Even though Moniker isn’t blocking it.
that seems to be a godaddy thing. for example i can look up moniker domains at dynadot.
Has anyone made a list of where we can find whois information based on which registrar the domain is registered at? For instance, I cannot currently check enom whois.