The Swiss Federal council adopted the lower laws to the telecommunicaiton act today. Amongst it is the Ordinance on Internet Domains that also regulates the ccTLD .ch. SWITCH-CERT welcomes the new ordinance and the smart regulation by the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM). The Ordinance on Internet Domains will come to power on 1.1.2021 and has some important changes.
The most obvious ist that the personal data of domain holders will no longer be published in the public whois, following other European countries and the GDPR. This is an important change to protect the privacy of Domain holders. There will be a regulated and monitored access for Swiss Authorities and others that require that data for fighting cybercrime or have other legitimate reasons to get access to the identity of a domain holder. You can find more information on the SWITCH website.
Not so obvious, but from the CERT and security persepective as important is that the .ch zone file will be published as a whole. While the data about (active) .ch domains itself has been published in the distributed Domain Name System ever since, the file containing all domain names – the .ch “zone” – was never public. This will change as of January 2021, details on how to access the .ch zone file will be published at the SWITCH open data page soon.
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