With Data Escrow, DENIC will soon provide a new service to the DENIC registrars. The Cooperative has successfully passed all the applicable reviews by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and has now been accredited as Third Party Provider for Registrar Data Escrow, in short TPP RDE.

In a next step, DENIC plans to offer an additional escrow service for registries. The Cooperative is already preparing for the new gTLD Escrow Agent accreditation process. You will find more detailed information on this topic on our website at https://www.denic.de/en/service/escrow-services.

Data Escrow
Data Escrow principally is the act of storing data and information with a neutral third party to be held in trust by them. This measure is meant to ensure that business activities can be continued by an independent party in case of failure, such as insolvency, on the basis of the stored data. Domain data is rated to be such type of relevant business data. ICANN therefore requests all registrars and registries it has accredited to regularly store the data sets of the gTLD domains managed by them with an independent escrow provider. In case a registrar or registry encounters (technical or financial) problems, these data can be handed over to a designated partner to be defined by ICANN in order to ensure continued operation of the domains.

With its new service, DENIC offers gTLD registrars, in particular those domiciled in Europe, a perfect solution to meet their – recently amended – escrow obligations under European law. In October 2015, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled the Safe Harbor Agreement, under which the USA had been classified as a safe third country for years, invalid. The successor agreement, Privacy Shield, is still being heavily debated, so that long-term legal security in this context is a long way off.