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


From: Shane Ronan via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:44:31 -0400

John,

Your email says "This transition is an important step toward improving
alignment with established IETF standards.", aligning a new feature to a
standard doesn't mean shutting down a service that is used in so many ways,
and expecting users to rely on a service that by your own admission isn't
the standard in todays OS deployments.

Wouldn't it make sense to work with the OS community to rdap clients
ubiquitous before pushing a sunset of whois?

Shane

On Sat, Aug 15, 2026 at 10:06 PM John Levine via NANOG <
nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

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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