Recent Posts
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Pilot program for Whois killer launches
ICANN is to oversee a set of pilot programs for RDAP, the protocol expected to eventually replace Whois.
Registration Data Access Protocol, an IETF standard since 2015, fills the same function as Whois, but it is more structured and enables access control rules.
ICANN said this week that it has launched the pilot in response to a request last month from the Registries Stakeholder Group and Registrars Stakeholder Group. It said on its web site:
The goal of this pilot program is to develop a baseline profile (or profiles) to guide implementation, establish an implementation target date, and develop a plan for the implementation of a production RDAP service.
Participation will be voluntary by registries and registrars. It appears that ICANN is merely coordinating the program, which will see registrars and registrars offer their own individual pilots.
So far, no registries or registrars have notified ICANN of their own pilots, but the program is just a few days old.
It is expected that the pilots will allow registrars and registries to experiment with different types of profiles (how the data is presented) and extensions before ICANN settles on a standard, contractually enforced format.
Under RDAP, ICANN/IANA acts as a “bootstrapping” service, maintaining a list of RDAP servers and making it easier to discover which entity is authoritative for which domain name.
RDAP is basically Whois, but it’s based on HTTP/S and JSON, making it easier to for software to parse and easier to compare records between TLDs and registrars.
It also allows non-Latin scripts to be more easily used, allowing internationalized registration data.
Perhaps most controversially, it is also expected to allow differentiated access control.
This means in future, depending on what policies the ICANN community puts in place, millions of current Whois users could find themselves with access to fewer data elements than they do today.
The ICANN pilot will run until July 31, 2018.
Imagine ICANN did a pilot and no one joined…
Give them time. The registries specifically requested this.
We can dream, right?
Gotta light?
This is great. Parsing whois is a PITA.
“Differentiated access control” so perhaps personal details will be hidden from the general public? Might make whois privacy services redundant.