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

[David Conrad via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

John,

On Aug 28, 2026, at 10:56 AM, John R. Levine <johnl () iecc com> wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Aug 2026, David Conrad wrote:
> > While I definitely agree that RDAP is vastly preferable to Whois, care
> > may be warranted here. Aliasing whois to rdap will (may?) work for
> > address lookups, a large number of ccTLDs do not support RDAP (of
> > course, some don’t even support Whois either) and some TLDs (both cc and
> > g) block IPs, e.g., from cloud providers or, oddly, residential ISP
> > blocks.
>
> Remember that this argument was about WHOIS and RDAP at the RIRs.  

I was responding to Nick who was suggesting aliasing ‘whois’ to ‘rdap’. My point was that this would break some 
DNS-related ‘whois’ lookups that “work".

> I agree it's harder for domains due to the tail of ccTLDs that don't do RDAP, but few of those have WHOIS that 
> returns anything useful.

My experience with RDAP at the ccTLDs suggests the tail is quite fat (I ran a quick test and it suggested there were 
134 TLDs that answered Whois but not RDAP), but I’d agree that the folks who don’t do RDAP are also unlikely to do 
anything useful for Whois. 

Regards,
-drc

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