[hughesey]

This was announced originally early last year. It removes the requirement for TLD and nTLD (not ccTLD) operators to have a WHOIS service available, but doesn't mandate they must shut them down.

So far the sunsetting has had little effect with most TLDs still having their WHOIS services online. In reality, I think we'll see a period of time where many TLDs and nTLDs have both WHOIS and RDAP available.

Additionally, since ccTLD's aren't governed by ICANN, many don't even have an RDAP service available. As such, there's going to be a mix of RDAP and WHOIS in use across the entire internet for some time to come.

Disclosure: I run https://viewdns.info/ and have spent many an hour dealing with both WHOIS and RDAP parsing to make sure that our service returns consistent data (via our web interface and API) regardless of the protocol in use.

[tephra]

I think RDAP is going to be adopted by more and more ccTLDs as well. WHOIS is not a particularly well liked protocol (I was at an IETF meeting where ICANN did a presentation on the timeline and people were literally cheering for the demise of WHOIS).

Disclosure: Work in the ccTLD space.

[hughesey]

100% agree that there will be more ccTLD operators that will implement RDAP. The sooner we're on a consistent protocol the better!

[jbverschoor]

It's funny to see that a lot of services are finally moving from a human-readable / plain text format towards structured protocols right at the point where we can finally have LLMS parse the unstructured protocols :-)

[ajnin]

Well you can't really trust an LLM to give you reproducible output every time, you can't even trust it to be faithful to the input data, so that's nice to have a standard format now. And for like a millionth of the computing resources to parse it. Also Whois was barely human-readable, with the fields all over the place, missing or different from one registry to the other. A welcome change that should have come really sooner.

[vrighter]

we can't ever have LLMs reliably parse any form of data. You know what can parse it perfectly though? A parser. Which works perfectly, and consistently.

[_ache_]

If you job is to be a referent, to have authority. You absolutely don't want to make any error. Pretty safe isn't enough, you need to be absolutely sure that you control the output.

You only have one job, don't delegate authority.

[francislavoie]

But isn't using LLM for that really expensive? Seems wasteful.

[klysm]

Which world would you rather live in: * structured protocols that can be parsed by machines * unstructured protocols that are unreliably parsed by LLMs that require significant power and latency

[axegon_]

https://deviq.com/antipatterns/shiny-toy

[RealStickman_]

Off topic thank you for runnig viewdns.info. I don't use it regularly, mainly for the occasional WHOIS information lookup and it has always worked perfectly.

[hughesey]

Thanks for the kind words and glad it's been useful :).

[tecleandor]

It's kind of funny some operators have never had it in practice. For example, .es never had a public whois, and need to register with a national ID (and I think with a fixed IP address) to get access to it.

[berkes]

That need for a national ID hasn't been in place for a long time, AFAIK.

I have a .es (my nickname berkes, domain berk.es) for almost 16 years now, and live in the EU, but not in Spain. In the beginning I used a small company that offered services for non-spanish companies to register .es through them (I believe they technically owned the domains?). But today it's just in my local domain registrar without need for an ID.

That .es has no whois has struck me as somewhat of a benefit actually. Back in the days, it kept away a lot of spam from spammers that'd just lift email-addresses off the whois. My .com, .nl and other domains recieve(d) significant more such spam. Let alone phone-number and other personal details delivered over an efficient, decentralized network. Though recent privacy addons(?) have mitigated that a little.

[belorn]

Usually, the need to use an ID is only for private persons (and usually only if they are nationals). Anyone else should not need that. The general theory is that a nation can only verify data that they themselves have.

Some ccTLD's have rules against registrations by people not located within the country that owns the ccTLD, in which case a valid national id or organization number would be required. From what I can see, .es does not have that requirement.

[reaperducer]

For example, .es never had a public whois, and need to register with a national ID (and I think with a fixed IP address) to get access to it.

Is this new? I had an .es domain around 2011, and am not Spanish, or even European.

[spurgu]

Hey, I've been looking for a tool that can do reverse NS lookup for a nameserver pairs (ie. which domains have nameservers ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com) but all the services out there that I've found can only do one. Is this something you would consider implementing?

[notRobot]

Thank you so much for running your service. I've used it for years, and LOVE how functional and useful it is!