Is WHOIS going to go away?

Sat Apr 21 20:58:43 UTC 2018

On April 21, 2018 at 08:38 marka at isc.org (Mark Andrews) wrote:
 > Whois contact details need to work so you can contact the zone owner when the DNS is broken for the zone. 
 > 
 > Publishing Whois data in the zone does not work for this purpose.
 > 
 > This is not to discount other reasons for having a independent communications channel. 

That's actually an excellent point and counterpoint to my suggestion
to move the WHOIS information into DNS RRs.

But backup and failover are reasonably well understood technologies
where one cares. Registrars could for example cache copies of those
zone records and act as failover whois servers.

In practice the vast majority, by number though not criticality, would
be served by registrars anyhow as that's where most domain owners'
zone info etc is anyhow. And many more valuable applications use
various DNS backup services now.

Nonetheless the point you raise would need to be on any requirements
list for the change I suggest (move WHOIS into the DNS) and would need
to be addressed.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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