WHOIS lookups are under threat in Belarus.

The changes adopted in Belarus regarding domain registration and website viewing also affect those who want to know the details of the domain to which a website in the .by zone is registered.

According to the Law "On Information, Informatization, and Information Protection," personal data cannot be publicly accessible. In compliance with this law, the Operational and Analytical Center of 2015 issued recommendations to registrars to provide domain name owner data only with their written consent. This meant that viewing WHOIS data for .by domain sites was effectively impossible.

Yesterday, it became known that the WHOIS service may indeed be publicly accessible, but only to legal entities. Yuri Zisser, owner of the TUT.by website and hosting company Hoster.by, announced this on the portal's internet radio station.