Nominet seems to have become the first major registry services provider to start to retire Whois across its portfolio, already cutting off service for about 70 top-level domains.
Queries over port 43 to most of Nominet’s former Whois servers are no longer returning responses, and their URLs have been removed from the respective TLDs’ records on the IANA web site.
The move follows the expiration last month of ICANN’s contractual requirements to provide Whois in all gTLDs. Now, registries must use the successor protocol RDAP instead, with Whois optional.
A Nominet spokesperson tells us the shut-off, which affects large dot-brand clients including Amazon, happened after consultation with ICANN and clients on January 29.
TLDs Nominet was supporting under ICANN’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program are also affected.
The registry spokesperson said that the gTLDs .broadway, .cymru, .gop, .pharmacy, and .wales are still offering Whois, due to an interoperability issue:
“The sole reason for the retention of these gTLD WHOIS services is for interoperability with the Brand Safety Alliance (BSA) service integration, which does not yet support RDAP,” she said.
The BSA is the GoDaddy-backed project that offers the multi-TLD GlobalBlock trademark-blocking service.
Nominet’s flagship .uk is also still offering Whois, because Nominet discovered that some of its registrars were still using it, rather than EPP, to do domain availability checks.
The fact that a GoDaddy service and some .uk registrars still don’t support RDAP, even after a years-long ICANN transition plan, is perhaps revelatory.
I’ll admit the only reason I noticed Nominet’s Whois coverage was patchy was that I’d neglected to update one of my scripts and it started failing. Apparently I was not alone.
While RDAP can be fairly simple to implement (if I can do it…), actually finding each registry’s RDAP server is a bit more complicated than under the Whois regime.
All gTLD registries were obliged to offer Whois at whois.nic.[tld], and IANA would publish the URLs on its web site, but RDAP URLs are not standardized.
It’s not super obvious, but it seems instead you have to head over to IANA’s “Bootstrap Service” and download a JSON file containing a list of TLDs and their associated base RDAP URLs.
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