GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is a law that impacts countries of the European Union that will go into effect on May 25, 2018. GDPR regulates how personal data will be accessed and focuses on the consent of the data subject to permit whether or not their data will be processed and by whom. The greatest impact that this will affect domains is in WHOIS data accessibility which will be severely restricted by registrars as mandated by the new law.
WHOIS is heavily relied upon to attain contact information on the current owner of the domain, alerting to a domain’s availability for sale, and also is used in domain transfers. It can be immediately clear that this will impact the number of inbound sales opportunities. It will also impact mainstream marketplaces such as Sedo or Flippa which use WHOIS to confirm ownership and change of ownership. They may have to resort to other means such as uploading a small file to the root directory, or changing nameservers, or likely a combination of methods. This can put a heavy load on domain sellers that have large portfolios and may frustrate sales in general.
While ICANN is frantically trying to figure out a workable solution to the WHOIS dilemma in light of GDPR, there is no denying the privacy laws will impact everywhere and everyone online as the world becomes more and more reliant on digital data. And especially with the recent data breaches through hack attacks and unauthorized use of farmed data.
Best Solution to Domain Sales Under GDPR
The best solution to domain sales is to have a clear for sale message when your domain is typed into the browser, as well as a secure and easy-to-use form to receive an offer or a sale notification directly. WHOIS can’t be relied on any longer as a way for potential buyers to contact you. Using a mainstream marketplace will also become more complicated and costly.
To manually upload “for sale” pages to hundreds or more domains is very time consuming and not very practical. Domain Market Pro (DMP) offers the most ideal solution. DMP allows you to bulk redirect all your domains to domain sales pages or landing pages. You can control the message across all your domain sales pages and personalize it to each domain very easily and quickly. Receive offers through secure easy-to-use offer forms. Integration with leading payment and escrow providers. In short, DMP allows you to grow your domain sales even with GDPR in effect .