nanog mailing list archives Re: Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services)

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From: John Levine via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
Date: 15 Aug 2026 22:05:42 -0400

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According to Lavender-Jamie via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>:

Which rfc calls for the decommissioning of whois? If there is one, I 
have not heard about it yet.

None, but ICANN told their contracted TLDs to support RDAP by February
2024 for DNS names. In January 2025 they said that WHOIS is no longer
required, and a lot of them have now turned off their WHOIS servers.

These types of breaking changes must not be made until rdap obtains the 
same level of support that whois does.

We passed that point several years ago.  I have scripts that do a lot of
lookups of both IPs and domain names, and they use RDAP for everything other
than a few country ccTLDs that still don't do RDAP.

RDAP is much, much better than WHOIS. It has well defined query and
response syntax rather than being an ill-defined adaptation of a 50
year old proticol invented for something else, and since it's based on
HTTP it automatically handles redirects and forwarding and encryption
yin transit.

R's,
John
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Current thread:

• Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services) John Curran via NANOG (Aug 14)
  • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services) Randy Bush via NANOG (Aug 14)
    • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARINʼs Directory Services) John Curran via NANOG (Aug 14)
      • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARINʼs Directory Services) Cat Okita via NANOG (Aug 14)
    • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services) Job Snijders via NANOG (Aug 14)
      • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services) Sam Thomas via NANOG (Aug 15)
    • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARINʼs Directory Services) Mark Kosters via NANOG (Aug 14)
  • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services) Lavender-Jamie via NANOG (Aug 15)
    • Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services) Randy Bush via NANOG (Aug 15)
    • Re: Re: Whois using these ARIN services?? (fwd: Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services) John Levine via NANOG (Aug 15)