Curious, why retire Whois? With the ever increasing ARIN rates, can y’all not afford to continue the service? As it stands now, every time i use the whois web client (couple times a week), it never loads the first time (on any device and on any network i’m on) and i have to reload the page. How hard and expensive can it be to keep a whois webpage up and running? -Mike
On Aug 21, 2026, at 19:56, William Herrin via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 6:42 PM John Levine via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
I'm scratching my head. Is it really the case that nobody here has been using WHOIS to look up domain name info? Because that ship sailed years ago. ICANN mandated RDAP with about a two-year transition period which was over last year. If you want to get (what remains of) info about domains, you have to use RDAP, with a little bit of WHOIS left for some country code TLDs.
I just did a "whois" on my own domains and found it still working. And I checked under the hood - the client isn't using RDAP.
Maybe there's a disconnect between announcement and practice here? And the lack of outcry is because pragmatically speaking whois still works?
Regards, Bill Herrin _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/3O227WEG...