whois server features

Thu Jan 8 03:22:03 UTC 2015

>If only we could create a committee to fix whois...

Quite astonishingly, the IETF WEIRDS working group finished
successfully, and its documents will be published as RFCs when they
get through the editing queue in a month or two.  The protocol is
called RDAP, the queries are http, the results are json.

ARIN, APNIC, and RIPE have prototypes already that are a lot easier to
script than the text WHOIS.

RDAP is also supposed to work for domain name WHOIS, but the timeline
there is less clear.  ICANN has hired cnnic to do a freeware version
which we hope a lot of smaller registries will use.

R's,
John