The registries of many ccTLDs and some gTLDs employ the requirement of a local presence in a particular region. Sometimes, they refer to this requirement as a domicile or trustee contact. However, as a result of the GDPR, the registries of .de. (DENIC) and .uk (Nominet) have announced changes to their local presence policies. They will mostly relax the domicile requirement.
- On the 25th of May, DENIC will update its .de domain registration policy. Currently, if the domain holder is not domiciled in Germany, they have to appoint an administrative contact who lives in Germany. This person is then “the domain holder’s authorized representative for receiving the service of official or court documents.” This requirement will be relaxed. DENIC no longer requires a German domicile for new domain applications. That is, until a legal case is issued to DENIC about a domain with a holder who is not domiciled in Germany. At that moment, the domain holder must name a person in Germany as responsible for receiving the service of official or court documents. As a result, the local presence service of Openprovider still serves a goal. We will therefore keep it, and we will not mass-update all of our .de domains. Of course, you are free to update your domain yourself after the 25th of May according to the new policy.
- From the 22nd of May, Nominet does not require a local address for .uk domains anymore. As a result, we will update all existing .uk domains that use our local presence servic. We will replace the domain data by the legitimate contact data. Note that after this policy change, you can register with a postal box address again for .uk domain contacts.
If you have any questions about these local presence changes for .de and .uk, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
