A German Court Denies ICANN Request for Injunctive Relief on GDPR

Last week ICANN filed for an injunctive relief in a matter related to the latest EU Data law enforcement with the German regional court seeking assistance in interpreting the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in order to protect the data collected in WHOIS.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN“) has announced that the German regional court (LG Bonn) rejected the request for injunction against EPAG, a Germany-based, ICANN-accredited registrar that is part of the Tucows Group.

In particular, ICANN requested a clarification from the Court about whether EPAG should be obligated to continue to collect administrative and technical contact information for new domain name registrations, as it is required to do under its Registrar Accreditation Agreement with ICANN.

The parent company of EPAG, Tucows.com the German Registrar sued by ICANN also did respond to ICANN in a statement on its website

We realized that the domain name registration process, as outlined in ICANN’s 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, not only required us to collect and share information we didn’t need, it also required us to collect and share people’s information where we may not have a legal basis to do so. What’s more, it required us to process personal information belonging to people with whom we may not even have a direct relationship, namely the Admin and Tech contacts.

Its not known what will come out of this rejection as ICANN struggles to find an urgent solution to its GDPR enforcement predicament.