Whois vs GDPR, latest news

Wed May 23 02:37:00 UTC 2018

 Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but was domain whois ever really that
useful?  I can't remember ever using it for any legitimate sort of
activity, and I know it gets scraped quite a bit by spammers.  Most of the
data is bogus these days on a lot of TLDs which allow "anonymous
registrations" and which registrars often charge an extra dollar or two
for.  Showing the authoritative nameservers is neat, but a simple NS record
query against the next level up would suffice to provide that information
as well.  The date of expiration may be useful if you're trying to grab a
domain when it expires, but registrar policies often drag that out anyways
and half the time the registrar squats on any decent domain when it expires
anyhow.  Date of original registration may be interesting for one reason or
another... but none of this data is personally identifiable information
anyhow.

Now on the other hand, RIR whois is actually very useful for determining
the rightful owner and abuse contacts for IP address space... Since RIRs
are designated by region and, afaik, only RIPE NCC data would be impacted
by GDPR... well, I'm surprised this isn't being talked about more than the
domain name side of things.

Take care,
Matt