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StuntPope

easyDNS here.

1) We do not advertise in Germany.

2) Our client is not German.

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Do you have other clients who are in Germany?

It appears that you do act as a registrar for .DE domains. At least, entering "ascascdasdcascascascasdcasdc.de" on the search on the front page at https://easydns.com/ offers to register it for me. It's purely a guess on my part, but I'd expect that most people who purchase .DE domains are in Germany, so if you've actually sold a few .DE domains you probably have some German customers.

That might not be enough to open you up to having to worry about German law...but it is enough that I would not dismiss that possibility out of hand.

PS: your site seems partly broken. I first tried to check for .DE on this page: https://easydns.com/domains/register/

Entering "ascascdasdcascascascasdcasdc.de" on the search there does nothing for me in Firefox. I had uBlock Origin on, so turned it off. Still nothing. Then I switched to Chrome, using a profile with no relevant extensions, and still nothing.

So instead I just went to the list below that lists all the TLDs you handle, and went through to find DE. That has a "Special Requirements" link, which doesn't do anything for me in either Firefox or Chrome.

PPS: in Firefox's console, it shows these messages for that page that isn't working right:

'Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://matomo.int.easydns.net/piwik.js”." at register:1:1

'unreachable code after return statement' at signup.js:15:1

In fact, to be able to offer .de domains as registrar, you have to join DENIC, and .de domains can only be owned by a legal German person, and always have to have an actual German person as representative.

To me this looks like German law definitely applies to them.

> In fact, to be able to offer .de domains as registrar, you have to join DENIC, and .de domains can only be owned by a legal German person, and always have to have an actual German person as representative.

Most companies offering .de domains do so as resellers, they don't need to be members of DENIC. Also, .de domains can be owned by people and entities outside of Germany, but require either the domain owner or the adminc to be in Germany. Most international registrars offer a service to provide a local adminc.

Thanks - going to have that looked at. Wrt whether we are subject to German law, we have written about this at length in the past. Our position is absent a treaty codifies reciprocity, it is impossible for an ISP to comply with various and sundry foreign jurisdiction laws.

We comply with the laws of the country in which we are domiciled, which is Canada.

A German court might still find that in order to stop a copyright infringement, since they have no means to order you directly, they might order German ISPs instead to black out EasyDNS. Tho, in practice, they'd probably just order to black out the particular domain in question.

You offer .de domains. Customers buying .de domains have to be, necessarily, German, so you’re necessarily advertising to German customers.

> Customers buying .de domains have to be, necessarily, German

According to DENIC's TOS, the domain owner doesn't have to be German (as long as they appoint a Germany-based representative for receiving correspondence official and court correspondence, but that's not easyDNS' concern).

It’s hard to argue that you don’t cater to the german market if you market a product that explicitly requires a german representative.

The product sold by EasyDNS is not targeted at the german market, it's targeted at people who (often, not always¹) want to offer their products (or information, or something else) to Germans.

¹ some just want some domain hack that ends in "de". I have a .es domain, despite having no intention of targeting the Spanish market, just because the name of the site ended in "es".

There are 16'254'421 .de domains. Only 1'225'965 are owned by non-German people or institutions. That’s about 7%.

It’s quite hard to argue they’re not catering for the German market if they sell a product with 93% German customers, specific for the German market.

You might like to update your blog post with that info.

I came here with the same thought, assuming that your client was German. But it seems you are just a third party, and good luck to them.

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