The whois service for the legacy top-level domain for Germany (.de) is one of the most fucked up things on the internet.

For years now they've restricted the whois service to notice you about their website information service (https://denic.de/en, you run a search and get information about the domain) which already cost you an unnecessary amount of time if you simply want to lookup something.

A while back they changed it so that you need to state whether you want to look it up fotr informative purposes or business purposes, then they changed it so that you need to supply a reason in a text box.

The new (GDPR) way is that you only get the connectivity status ("connect", "free") via whois and the nameservers on the website (without supplying a reason, which actually is an improvement). Everything this either is for executive authorities or the domain owner (by entering their mail address or zip code).

Germany - the land of "We can opt out of any standard because we can and since theaws changed we can also behave like dickbutts".

Adding the GDPR now only fed the trolls even more.