Welcome to Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Ashken Kazarian. Who is the system used for querying

databases of information on domain name, registrations, and IP addresses has been vital

tool for journalists and securities researchers and law enforcement in identifying and tracking

spammers, fissures, identity

thieves, and other cybercriminals. However, when the EU's general data protection regulation

takes effect on May 25th, the service will heavily be limited or possibly shut down completely

in order to comply with privacy requirements. How will this impact cybersecurity? Does

who has raised legitimate privacy concerns? We will this impact cybersecurity? Does Who is raise legitimate

privacy concerns? We're joined by Shane Hughes, president of Logan Circle Strategies and

visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Tim Chen CEO of the main tools to discuss.

Thank you for joining me, Shane, Tim. Thank you for having us. First off, what is Who Is?

So the Who Is is a very old protocol from Internet years.

It started in the mid-80s.

A little strange fact is at one point actually AT&T ran the Who-Is, but couldn't find any reason to make money on it because no one was really on the Internet yet.

And so they put it back. And the then network solutions, now Verasigned, who run the dot com net, then org,

started to administer it. What the Who is has in it is two key pieces of information. The administrative contact and the technical contact.

And the legacy reason for that was the administrative contact was how you got paid. So if they

didn't pay for their leasing their domain name, you knew who to contact. And the second piece was

basically if your computer was causing problems, they knew who to bring the IP number back to.

So it's been like that for a long time. There have been numerous times where people wanted to change it, but there are throughout the years, and it has really been law enforcement and government. And since then, you know, companies that have seen the opportunities of using it as a tool to secure things on the Internet, it has a very long following.

So the idea of changing the Who is because of a change in the European data protection laws is very challenging to the entire ecosystem of the internet.

Tim, in a who is lookup, registers must collect and display a range of information.

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