As of 6 June, DENIC, the registry for Germany’s ccTLD, is accredited as an Escrow Agent under ICANN’s new gTLD programme, which means they are now officially authorised to operate a back-up storage service for the business data of domain registries (Registry Data Escrow, RyDE).
DENIC is now one of 9 Authorised New gTLD Data Escrow Agents. Three of these are resident in Europe. However, DENIC is the sole agent who, by special agreement with ICANN, is able to offer its escrow service both in compliance with the applicable European data protection regulations and in a manner that allows the place of jurisdiction for the contractual relationship between the registry customer and DENIC to be chosen freely by the parties.
Being neither a registrar nor a gTLD registry, DENIC is unique in that their existing services do not compete with the potential customers of its Escrow Service. DENIC deploys state-of-the art cryptography and multiple redundancies to safeguard the secure transmission and storage of all domain registration data. Storage will be exclusively in data centres located in Europe (i.e. in Germany and the Netherlands), in compliance with European data protection regulations.
