This was announced originally early last year. It removes the requirement for TLD and nTLD (not ccTLD) operators to have a WHOIS service available, but doesn't mandate they must shut them down.
So far the sunsetting has had little effect with most TLDs still having their WHOIS services online. In reality, I think we'll see a period of time where many TLDs and nTLDs have both WHOIS and RDAP available.
Additionally, since ccTLD's aren't governed by ICANN, many don't even have an RDAP service available. As such, there's going to be a mix of RDAP and WHOIS in use across the entire internet for some time to come.
Disclosure: I run https://viewdns.info/ and have spent many an hour dealing with both WHOIS and RDAP parsing to make sure that our service returns consistent data (via our web interface and API) regardless of the protocol in use.
I think RDAP is going to be adopted by more and more ccTLDs as well. WHOIS is not a particularly well liked protocol (I was at an IETF meeting where ICANN did a presentation on the timeline and people were literally cheering for the demise of WHOIS).
It's funny to see that a lot of services are finally moving from a human-readable / plain text format towards structured protocols right at the point where we can finally have LLMS parse the unstructured protocols :-)
Off topic thank you for runnig viewdns.info. I don't use it regularly, mainly for the occasional WHOIS information lookup and it has always worked perfectly.
It's kind of funny some operators have never had it in practice. For example, .es never had a public whois, and need to register with a national ID (and I think with a fixed IP address) to get access to it.
Hey, I've been looking for a tool that can do reverse NS lookup for a nameserver pairs (ie. which domains have nameservers ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com) but all the services out there that I've found can only do one. Is this something you would consider implementing?
The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash.
All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe.
And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.
That was a common racket a long time ago, but pretty much every widely recommended registrar offers free whois privacy now. At least when they're allowed to, some TLDs forbid obfuscating the whois information.
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
More recently, yes. But the original (perhaps naive) goal was to keep domain owners accountable for whatever they were serving from hosts under their domains. That seems reasonable, at least on a more "polite" internet, where things weren't scraped and monetized and SEO'd into garbage.
The general purpose of publicly accessible registrant data is that people should be able to contact the owner of the domain in case of an issue, rather than the registry or registrar. "domain privacy" is simply the registrar putting themselves as the domain contact and becoming a forwarding service to you.
For large companies, and registrants under those ccTLD's that require local presence, it not uncommon that a legal firm acts like a proxy for the domain owner. This is a service that they take a few dollars for, and is in many ways similar to domain privacy.
The requirement of having the registrant as the contact person for a domain is something that (to my knowledge) comes from ICANN, and I think it has a positive effect. A domain should be owned and controlled by the registrant and not the registrar, which is then reflected in the contact information. In an alternate history we could see that the registrar (or even registry) owned the domain and only leased it to the registrant, in which case the registrant's power would be limited to other online services that people "buy" today.
I was going to buy a domain back in my student days, but I stopped when I realised I didn't have a phone number. I used the public phone-box on the corner whenever I needed to actually call anyone. It was a little annoying to have to register a phone number when I didn't actually want anyone to call me.
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
The concept of most internet things has felt sleazy for many years. Right around the time that businesses started monetizing the internet is when that feeling really kicked off tbqh
> the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available
Note that it is being replaced with a different protocol, is there any indication that there are less stringent requirements on identity data disclosure on the new proto?
For .pl TLD, due to GDPR, domain data is hidden by default for private individuals (as opposed to companies), yet some registrars still try to upsell the "domain privacy", hoping you don't know about it.
Both give you a way to find out the domain's registrar, registration date, transfer status, and administrative contacts like abuse@. Nameserver data can also be somehow useful.
Otherwise, what did you expect the registrar to divulge to you, a random passer-by?
Wow. I never noticed how much how I used the internet changed. I haven’t done a WHOIS in a decade.
When I started using the internet, it’s how I contacted people. If I liked their site or their blog, I’d check who was behind it and get an email address I could contact.
Now… humans don’t really own domains anymore. Content is so centralized. I obviously noticed this shift, but I had forgotten how I used to be able to interact with the internet.
I think in most ways it's better, it makes the web more approachable to less technical users, making it less gate-keepey, but I also kind of miss the loosely-coupled cluster of web pages from the late-90's and early 2000's web.
Stuff felt less homogeneous; everyone had kind of a loose understanding of HTML, and people would customize their pages in horrendously wonderful ways. It felt more personal.
My only nitpick is that humans still own domains, but I agree with the overall sentiment and thank you for sharing this perspective.
It is fascinating to consider how our experience with the internet is changing over time.
Remember phreaking? Having been born in the Netscape era, I certainly don't, but I can imagine that losing the ability to pull that trick off must have felt like a loss to those who were initiated in the art.
Thankfully the trend appears to be that new technologies and thus new 1337 h4x are still forthcoming.
I sometimes use whois multiple times in a day lol.
Should it exist? Maybe not, probably not, but that doesn't stop me from using it when I want to try to do some sleuthing. Most of the time though it doesn't work because they have privacy enabled.
I did get screwed once with certain TLDs not being able to enable privacy. I had registered a .at domain to use with a video site I had that at the time was reasonably popular and going viral fairly regularly. I hadn't realized beforehand that privacy wasn't possible, but once I learned, I didn't love it, but I wasn't sure if it would matter that much. I was wrong. I was getting calls and emails regularly from random people on the internet who found our content on reddit or whatever and decided to do some sleuthing
I did a Whois last week to prove to my previous registrar that I'm no longer with them, and that the invoice they sent was invalid. Unexpected use-case, but useful.
On the other hand, I did a WHOIS days ago to check up on a potential scam site my partner landed on while working on an e-commerce platform. I hope some alternative exists, people using Let's Encrypt leaves an entry in the transparency log but people don't necessarily need to use that. I haven't researched the alternatives to WHOIS yet but now I'll have to.
Bit deceptive to editorialize it into something that sounds like something else much more interesting (removing contact info from domains) but isn't the case at all (they're just changing the method to access the same info).
I like WHOIS with its extreme simplicity [0]. RDAP, on the other hand, works on top of a large and changing HTTP [1], and uses a JS-derived serialization format [2]. RDAP has advantages, such as optionally benefiting from TLS, the data being better structured and defined, but the cost in added complexity seems high.
Most people won't even notice this change. They'll still go to a "whois lookup service" and input a domain, and get the same results. The fact that it arrived via a different protocol (RDAP) won't mean anything.
Back in 2014, when TLD .church was introduced, me and my friends tried to register alonzo.church and (ab)use the contact information records to provide some biographic information and links, explaining literally whois alonzo.church on the command line. That would not prevent hosting whatever services on that domain as normal.
Sadly, we were not able to secure the domain on time, and after 11 years, the attempted trick is becoming irrelevant.
I don't play with domains all day, but this very much feels like nothing important was accomplished, and things are just being made more complicated for political reasons. Sorry if that is being harsh, but I've never had any issue using WHOIS.
I've had domains registered for over 30 years. I liked WHOIS because it provided a means to report abuse, which has gone from zero 30 years ago, to massive amounts of daily spam and network probes.
I was not happy when ICANN began to allow privacy features in domain registration data, and I never made mine private. Most reputable sites still provide contact information via WHOIS.
Hopefully RDAP will be a suitable replacement. I haven't tried it yet.
My first question when reading this was how is it going to affect the `whois` CLI tool, which I use at least weekly for both IPs and Domains. I even started trying to find source code before getting pulled away. Luckily I had an excuse to use it today and noticed that an RDAP endpoint was already being queried for the information. Good to know I won't have to change any habits!
(or brew install, etc., depending on your os and tooling). The jq formatted output is a little more verbose than the whois one, but three cheers for a well-specified machine-parsable format. (and rdap has a pretty-printed format output also)
People say WHOIS is useless these days due to WHOIS privacy, but it's useful for at least one thing: checking when a domain was registered/transferred. Fishy stuff tend to be registered/transferred recently. Also older and larger companies tend to not hide their organizational identity.
Btw, I tried the icann-rdap CLI tool and the default rendered-markdown output mode is atrocious. Sea of output, each nameserver has one or more standalone tables taking up 15x$repetition lines, almost impossible to fish out useful info. The retro gtld-whois mode is so much cleaner. Their web tool https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup is fine too, don't know why the rendered markdown mode isn't like that. WTF.
I have no doubt some of the benefits are definitely to be able to resell or access that data once again. I literally just told someone yesterday “don’t pay for domain privacy, any registrar worth a damn will include it anymore”
My main use for WHOIS currently is actually not for domain names. I use it for querying IP addresses on whois.arin.net. Does anyone know how this news will impact that particular service, if at all?
Anyone experienced with this, I am not seeing abuse contact info, usually a phone number or email. Am i supposed to follow hyperlinks to get this info or something? Like search the registrar for this data?
The fact most WHOIS is private these days makes it more or less useless.
I think rdap with a request/response authentication on the requestor but that the provider can't mask would be more practical.
Also requiring that registrars keep a history of changes from the time the domain was first registered would be very helpful vs relying on 3rd parties that cache the data over time (and charge for it) like domaintools.
Unlikely that this is in the protocol but I think it would better the entire ecosystem.
I can remember times when you could still see the names and addresses of registrants in whois records. That was before abuse and fraud became everyday occurrences in today's internet.
I miss the times when we could still believe in basic human decency.
From what I've seen most domain servers don't really implement the history components of RDAP, which is a shame - being able to see if a domain ownership lapsed or was transferred historically would be great for being able to determine if somebody's email address is still trustworthy or has been stolen by a domain transfer.
Whois needs it's own port open usually, this is good I suppose, now it's all HTTPS. Now, if only passive dns resolution data was part of this same api. As it stands today, if you're looking into WHOIS information, historical WHOIS and passive dns are a must, and they are usually provided by commercial entities.
ICANN's DNS servers is one of the only systems on the internet that requires people to continually pay money to have a name. X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all let you register a name for free and without submitting all of your personal information. The entire model here is outdated with what users want.
The main benefit of whois and RDAP is to see which registrar handles a domain and when there were recent changes or upcoming expiry etc. RDAP is also useful to see who operates an IP address etc. I've been using RDAP for a few years but the service has been spotty, hopefully that improves now.
it was fun when having a network solutions/internic contact handle was a badge of honor.
the early internet was fun. whois was always a fun dimension.
is there a canonical rdap client that will end up everywhere? one of the nice things about the early Internet was that there were canonical utilities that were everywhere.
What does this mean for the command line tool whois? It definitely works still and it's still being updated...
> whois ycombinator.com
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object
refer: whois.verisign-grs.com
domain: COM
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
contact: administrative
name: Registry Customer Service
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
phone: +1 703 925-6999
fax-no: +1 703 948 3978
e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
contact: technical
name: Registry Customer Service
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
phone: +1 703 925-6999
fax-no: +1 703 948 3978
e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
Glad I read this, I wasn't aware whois was being sunsetted. Now I have to change one of my critical services to do rdap. Wow. How can you sunset the main service that is the backbone of the internet?
it's still unsupported by a lot of tld's and the rate limits are atrocious. some registrar's only allow 10 requests per day and will group huge netblocks into one single block.
I havent had a successful use of whois in probably over a decade. What was once a useful tool was destroyed by spammers harvesting email addresses and privacy oriented registrars.
This was announced originally early last year. It removes the requirement for TLD and nTLD (not ccTLD) operators to have a WHOIS service available, but doesn't mandate they must shut them down.
So far the sunsetting has had little effect with most TLDs still having their WHOIS services online. In reality, I think we'll see a period of time where many TLDs and nTLDs have both WHOIS and RDAP available.
Additionally, since ccTLD's aren't governed by ICANN, many don't even have an RDAP service available. As such, there's going to be a mix of RDAP and WHOIS in use across the entire internet for some time to come.
Disclosure: I run https://viewdns.info/ and have spent many an hour dealing with both WHOIS and RDAP parsing to make sure that our service returns consistent data (via our web interface and API) regardless of the protocol in use.
I think RDAP is going to be adopted by more and more ccTLDs as well. WHOIS is not a particularly well liked protocol (I was at an IETF meeting where ICANN did a presentation on the timeline and people were literally cheering for the demise of WHOIS).
Disclosure: Work in the ccTLD space.
It's funny to see that a lot of services are finally moving from a human-readable / plain text format towards structured protocols right at the point where we can finally have LLMS parse the unstructured protocols :-)
Off topic thank you for runnig viewdns.info. I don't use it regularly, mainly for the occasional WHOIS information lookup and it has always worked perfectly.
It's kind of funny some operators have never had it in practice. For example, .es never had a public whois, and need to register with a national ID (and I think with a fixed IP address) to get access to it.
Hey, I've been looking for a tool that can do reverse NS lookup for a nameserver pairs (ie. which domains have nameservers ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com) but all the services out there that I've found can only do one. Is this something you would consider implementing?
Thank you so much for running your service. I've used it for years, and LOVE how functional and useful it is!
The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash.
All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe.
And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.
This is about sunsetting the WHOIS protocol in favor of RDAP, not doing away with domain owner registration data.
That was a common racket a long time ago, but pretty much every widely recommended registrar offers free whois privacy now. At least when they're allowed to, some TLDs forbid obfuscating the whois information.
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
More recently, yes. But the original (perhaps naive) goal was to keep domain owners accountable for whatever they were serving from hosts under their domains. That seems reasonable, at least on a more "polite" internet, where things weren't scraped and monetized and SEO'd into garbage.
The general purpose of publicly accessible registrant data is that people should be able to contact the owner of the domain in case of an issue, rather than the registry or registrar. "domain privacy" is simply the registrar putting themselves as the domain contact and becoming a forwarding service to you.
For large companies, and registrants under those ccTLD's that require local presence, it not uncommon that a legal firm acts like a proxy for the domain owner. This is a service that they take a few dollars for, and is in many ways similar to domain privacy.
The requirement of having the registrant as the contact person for a domain is something that (to my knowledge) comes from ICANN, and I think it has a positive effect. A domain should be owned and controlled by the registrant and not the registrar, which is then reflected in the contact information. In an alternate history we could see that the registrar (or even registry) owned the domain and only leased it to the registrant, in which case the registrant's power would be limited to other online services that people "buy" today.
You’re just using bad registrars.
https://porkbun.com/products/whois_privacy
I've never had to pay Namecheap extra for WHOIS protection.
I was going to buy a domain back in my student days, but I stopped when I realised I didn't have a phone number. I used the public phone-box on the corner whenever I needed to actually call anyone. It was a little annoying to have to register a phone number when I didn't actually want anyone to call me.
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
The concept of most internet things has felt sleazy for many years. Right around the time that businesses started monetizing the internet is when that feeling really kicked off tbqh
I don't have the greatest registrar but hiding my info from whois is free
Phone books went out to the city , the internet is full of every scammer from Bangalore to Bangladesh.
> the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available
Your registrar is scamming you.
Note that it is being replaced with a different protocol, is there any indication that there are less stringent requirements on identity data disclosure on the new proto?
Or you find one of the many registrars that offer free private whois, and none of these problems exist.
if you use a sleazy domain registrar, you get what you get. the good ones offer privacy for free.
For .pl TLD, due to GDPR, domain data is hidden by default for private individuals (as opposed to companies), yet some registrars still try to upsell the "domain privacy", hoping you don't know about it.
[flagged]
RDAP replaces WHOIS, offering a more technologically advanced way to discover the domain is protected by privacy services.
Domain whois is useless, but IP whois is at least kind of useful to check before blanket banning entire IP ranges.
Both give you a way to find out the domain's registrar, registration date, transfer status, and administrative contacts like abuse@. Nameserver data can also be somehow useful.
Otherwise, what did you expect the registrar to divulge to you, a random passer-by?
I get the joke, but whois is super valuable for abuse report contact and for registrar and even ip block info!
Huge protocol for cybersecurity
Wow. I never noticed how much how I used the internet changed. I haven’t done a WHOIS in a decade.
When I started using the internet, it’s how I contacted people. If I liked their site or their blog, I’d check who was behind it and get an email address I could contact.
Now… humans don’t really own domains anymore. Content is so centralized. I obviously noticed this shift, but I had forgotten how I used to be able to interact with the internet.
And after you emailed them you could finger their address and see when they last checked their email, and their unread message count usually.
I think in most ways it's better, it makes the web more approachable to less technical users, making it less gate-keepey, but I also kind of miss the loosely-coupled cluster of web pages from the late-90's and early 2000's web.
Stuff felt less homogeneous; everyone had kind of a loose understanding of HTML, and people would customize their pages in horrendously wonderful ways. It felt more personal.
My only nitpick is that humans still own domains, but I agree with the overall sentiment and thank you for sharing this perspective.
It is fascinating to consider how our experience with the internet is changing over time.
Remember phreaking? Having been born in the Netscape era, I certainly don't, but I can imagine that losing the ability to pull that trick off must have felt like a loss to those who were initiated in the art.
Thankfully the trend appears to be that new technologies and thus new 1337 h4x are still forthcoming.
I sometimes use whois multiple times in a day lol.
Should it exist? Maybe not, probably not, but that doesn't stop me from using it when I want to try to do some sleuthing. Most of the time though it doesn't work because they have privacy enabled.
I did get screwed once with certain TLDs not being able to enable privacy. I had registered a .at domain to use with a video site I had that at the time was reasonably popular and going viral fairly regularly. I hadn't realized beforehand that privacy wasn't possible, but once I learned, I didn't love it, but I wasn't sure if it would matter that much. I was wrong. I was getting calls and emails regularly from random people on the internet who found our content on reddit or whatever and decided to do some sleuthing
I use it primarily to lookup info on an IP address.
> Now… humans don’t really own domains anymore.
Even when they do, it's generally a smart idea to anonymize the whois information.
You might be looking up my domain to make a buddy, but someone else might be looking up my domain to SWAT me.
I did a Whois last week to prove to my previous registrar that I'm no longer with them, and that the invoice they sent was invalid. Unexpected use-case, but useful.
On the other hand, I did a WHOIS days ago to check up on a potential scam site my partner landed on while working on an e-commerce platform. I hope some alternative exists, people using Let's Encrypt leaves an entry in the transparency log but people don't necessarily need to use that. I haven't researched the alternatives to WHOIS yet but now I'll have to.
A big part of that is because GDPR basically murdered Whois. It hasn't been useful for many of those last ten years.
The article is titled:
> ICANN Update: Launching RDAP; Sunsetting WHOIS
Bit deceptive to editorialize it into something that sounds like something else much more interesting (removing contact info from domains) but isn't the case at all (they're just changing the method to access the same info).
I like WHOIS with its extreme simplicity [0]. RDAP, on the other hand, works on top of a large and changing HTTP [1], and uses a JS-derived serialization format [2]. RDAP has advantages, such as optionally benefiting from TLS, the data being better structured and defined, but the cost in added complexity seems high.
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3912
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9082
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9083
Worth mentioning are two open-source RDAP projects that are helping move the internet to a more structured system:
DNSBelgium: https://github.com/DNSBelgium/rdap
RedDog: https://www.reddog.mx/home/2017/12/14/server-1.2.2-patch-rel...
Most people won't even notice this change. They'll still go to a "whois lookup service" and input a domain, and get the same results. The fact that it arrived via a different protocol (RDAP) won't mean anything.
To be replaced with a system providing a standardized method to give law enforcement easier "secure access" to your redacted personal information.
Back in 2014, when TLD .church was introduced, me and my friends tried to register alonzo.church and (ab)use the contact information records to provide some biographic information and links, explaining literally whois alonzo.church on the command line. That would not prevent hosting whatever services on that domain as normal.
Sadly, we were not able to secure the domain on time, and after 11 years, the attempted trick is becoming irrelevant.
I just did an
on a Debian (well, Devuan) system, and found nothing. Also could not find that phrase in the name of any executable in /usr/bin or /usr/sbin .:-(
If distribution packages don't abstract this trivia away I'm going to be endlessly frustrated
I don't play with domains all day, but this very much feels like nothing important was accomplished, and things are just being made more complicated for political reasons. Sorry if that is being harsh, but I've never had any issue using WHOIS.
There's something about WHOIS I've never understood. If you run `whois ycombinator.com` you'll see name servers in the output.
But if you run `dig ycombinator.com ANY +noall +answer` you'll see name servers here too. If you see all the output together, you'll find the same name servers are present in WHOIS output and the DNS NS records. But wait, there's more.The name server `ns-225.awsdns-28.com` is present three times- in WHOIS, in DNS NS records, in DNS SOA record.
Which of these name servers get used to resolve `ycombinator.com` to its IP address like when I do `ping ycombinator.com`?
What if the information between the WHOIS and DNS NS records and the DNS SOA records are inconsistent? Which record wins?
I've had domains registered for over 30 years. I liked WHOIS because it provided a means to report abuse, which has gone from zero 30 years ago, to massive amounts of daily spam and network probes. I was not happy when ICANN began to allow privacy features in domain registration data, and I never made mine private. Most reputable sites still provide contact information via WHOIS.
Hopefully RDAP will be a suitable replacement. I haven't tried it yet.
My first question when reading this was how is it going to affect the `whois` CLI tool, which I use at least weekly for both IPs and Domains. I even started trying to find source code before getting pulled away. Luckily I had an excuse to use it today and noticed that an RDAP endpoint was already being queried for the information. Good to know I won't have to change any habits!
rdap is nice when it's available.
(or brew install, etc., depending on your os and tooling). The jq formatted output is a little more verbose than the whois one, but three cheers for a well-specified machine-parsable format. (and rdap has a pretty-printed format output also)People say WHOIS is useless these days due to WHOIS privacy, but it's useful for at least one thing: checking when a domain was registered/transferred. Fishy stuff tend to be registered/transferred recently. Also older and larger companies tend to not hide their organizational identity.
Btw, I tried the icann-rdap CLI tool and the default rendered-markdown output mode is atrocious. Sea of output, each nameserver has one or more standalone tables taking up 15x$repetition lines, almost impossible to fish out useful info. The retro gtld-whois mode is so much cleaner. Their web tool https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup is fine too, don't know why the rendered markdown mode isn't like that. WTF.
The linked page (https://lookup.icann.org/en) seems to work only for .com domains?
"No registry RDAP server was identified for this domain. Attempting lookup using WHOIS service."
"Failed to perform lookup using WHOIS service: TLD_NOT_SUPPORTED."
I have no doubt some of the benefits are definitely to be able to resell or access that data once again. I literally just told someone yesterday “don’t pay for domain privacy, any registrar worth a damn will include it anymore”
My main use for WHOIS currently is actually not for domain names. I use it for querying IP addresses on whois.arin.net. Does anyone know how this news will impact that particular service, if at all?
I wasn't aware of rdap.
Anyone experienced with this, I am not seeing abuse contact info, usually a phone number or email. Am i supposed to follow hyperlinks to get this info or something? Like search the registrar for this data?
When can I finally see an article announcing that ICANN has been sunsetted?
The fact most WHOIS is private these days makes it more or less useless.
I think rdap with a request/response authentication on the requestor but that the provider can't mask would be more practical.
Also requiring that registrars keep a history of changes from the time the domain was first registered would be very helpful vs relying on 3rd parties that cache the data over time (and charge for it) like domaintools.
Unlikely that this is in the protocol but I think it would better the entire ecosystem.
Good bye, then, whois.
I can remember times when you could still see the names and addresses of registrants in whois records. That was before abuse and fraud became everyday occurrences in today's internet.
I miss the times when we could still believe in basic human decency.
From what I've seen most domain servers don't really implement the history components of RDAP, which is a shame - being able to see if a domain ownership lapsed or was transferred historically would be great for being able to determine if somebody's email address is still trustworthy or has been stolen by a domain transfer.
Are existing whois-clients going to be updated to support RDAP next to Whois, or will we have to use different clients?
Whois needs it's own port open usually, this is good I suppose, now it's all HTTPS. Now, if only passive dns resolution data was part of this same api. As it stands today, if you're looking into WHOIS information, historical WHOIS and passive dns are a must, and they are usually provided by commercial entities.
ICANN's DNS servers is one of the only systems on the internet that requires people to continually pay money to have a name. X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all let you register a name for free and without submitting all of your personal information. The entire model here is outdated with what users want.
The main benefit of whois and RDAP is to see which registrar handles a domain and when there were recent changes or upcoming expiry etc. RDAP is also useful to see who operates an IP address etc. I've been using RDAP for a few years but the service has been spotty, hopefully that improves now.
it was fun when having a network solutions/internic contact handle was a badge of honor.
the early internet was fun. whois was always a fun dimension.
is there a canonical rdap client that will end up everywhere? one of the nice things about the early Internet was that there were canonical utilities that were everywhere.
Why isn't this data simply available as a custom DNS record type?
Seems far simpler than a whole custom protocol.
What does this mean for the command line tool whois? It definitely works still and it's still being updated...
> whois ycombinator.com % IANA WHOIS server % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org % This query returned 1 object
refer: whois.verisign-grs.com
domain: COM
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the)
contact: administrative name: Registry Customer Service organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the) phone: +1 703 925-6999 fax-no: +1 703 948 3978 e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
contact: technical name: Registry Customer Service organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the) phone: +1 703 925-6999 fax-no: +1 703 948 3978 e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
nserver: A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.5.6.30 2001:503:a83e:0:0:0:2:30 nserver: B.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.33.14.30 2001:503:231d:0:0:0:2:30 nserver: C.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.26.92.30 2001:503:83eb:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: D.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.31.80.30 2001:500:856e:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: E.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.12.94.30 2001:502:1ca1:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: F.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.35.51.30 2001:503:d414:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: G.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.42.93.30 2001:503:eea3:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: H.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.54.112.30 2001:502:8cc:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: I.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.43.172.30 2001:503:39c1:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: J.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.48.79.30 2001:502:7094:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: K.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.52.178.30 2001:503:d2d:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: L.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.41.162.30 2001:500:d937:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: M.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.55.83.30 2001:501:b1f9:0:0:0:0:30 ds-rdata: 19718 13 2 8acbb0cd28f41250a80a491389424d341522d946b0da0c0291f2d3d771d7805a
whois: whois.verisign-grs.com
status: ACTIVE remarks: Registration information: http://www.verisigninc.com
created: 1985-01-01 changed: 2023-12-07 source: IANA
# whois.verisign-grs.com
>>> Last update of whois database: 2025-03-17T01:27:31Z <<<My favourite part of my .ca domains is that personal data is protected by default and I don't have to pay for it as an additional service.
There's no need for people to know my information because I happen to own a domain.
It doesn't work with yandex.kz. Someone call Kazakhstan.
> No registry RDAP server was identified for this domain. Attempting lookup using WHOIS service.
> Failed to perform lookup using WHOIS service: TLD_NOT_SUPPORTED.
Stoked to see that ICANN reference implementations are now being written in rust!
https://github.com/icann/icann-rdap
So... WHOIS is now JSON over HTTP. I guess that's reasonable. But this warrants the sample application to need a gazillion crates why exactly?
I wonder which other old internet protocols fell into obsolescence.
Finger is not officially retired but no one supports it. NNTP seems it had a similar fate.
These days how can one register a domain anonymously, using crypto as payment, and without KYC?
Glad I read this, I wasn't aware whois was being sunsetted. Now I have to change one of my critical services to do rdap. Wow. How can you sunset the main service that is the backbone of the internet?
I hope archive.org will host a WHOWAS service.
this really looks like a regression. In the sense that RDAP could be cheated
looks bad. I see a loss in trust there
Missed opportunity to call the successor `whodat`
wow! something I didn't expect to read today, or in the near future.
r dap me up
check out the rdap deployment dashboard - https://deployment.rdap.org/
it's still unsupported by a lot of tld's and the rate limits are atrocious. some registrar's only allow 10 requests per day and will group huge netblocks into one single block.
This seems like it would break things.
I havent had a successful use of whois in probably over a decade. What was once a useful tool was destroyed by spammers harvesting email addresses and privacy oriented registrars.
I won't even notice its gone