Re: whois server features

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