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

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 <
[email protected]> wrote:

> According to Lavender-Jamie via NANOG <[email protected]>:
> >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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