There’s been a shocking increase in the time it takes to get a Whois record disclosed under ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service, according to the latest monthly data.
It took on average 14.09 days to have a request for private Whois data approved using RDRS, more than double the previous high, recorded in February, of 6.92 days, the data shows. The average since the system launched at the end of November is 6.73 days.
The average time to have a request denied was 11.26 days, up from 6.17 days in March, the data also shows.
RDRS is a mechanism that allows people — largely intellectual property interests and law enforcement — to request unredacted domain ownership information. ICANN doesn’t handle the requests, it just forwards them to the responsible registrar.
It’s not obvious from the data why requests in April suddenly took so much longer to approve. Any number of reasons, from technical problems to a shift in the mix towards particularly sluggish registrars, could have thrown the average.
The percentage of requests that were approved was down very slightly compared to March, at 19.16% compared to 20.26%. Denied requests were up to 71.26% compared to 69.5% in March. Requests were largely denied because of data protection law or because the requester didn’t provide enough information.
Since RDRS launched five months ago, there have been 1,215 disclosure requests, 210 of which were approved. That works out to about 1.36 approved requests per day.
Registrar coverage improved a little in April, with three registrars newly listed and one (Sweden’s Ilait AB, which has about 6,000 domains) removed. The number gTLD domains covered as a percentage remained flat at 57%.
ICANN has spent almost $2 million on RDRS to date. It’s a two-year pilot, and at some point it will have to be decided whether the expense is worth it.
The post It now takes TWO WEEKS to get a Whois record with RDRS first appeared on Domain Incite.
