WHOIS, RDAP and what is still public

What a lookup used to show

For most of the internet's history, any name could be looked up in a public directory called WHOIS, and the result listed the holder in full: name, postal address, telephone number and email. That openness was designed for a small technical community in which knowing who ran a machine was a practical necessity. It survived into a period in which anybody could read the home address of a volunteer who had registered a village foundation's website.

The consequences were predictable. Published addresses were harvested for unsolicited mail, for convincing fraud attempts timed to renewal dates, and occasionally for harassment. Registrars sold privacy services that replaced the holder's details with their own, which worked but added a layer between the true holder and the record.

What changed

Data protection law made blanket publication of personal data untenable, and the industry response was to redact by default. A lookup today generally returns the technical facts about a registration and withholds the personal ones. Where an organisation rather than an individual is the registrant, some registries still publish the organisational name, and others redact everything on the basis that an entry cannot reliably be classified.

The details still exist. They are held by the registrar, they are still required to be accurate, and they are still what determines authority over the name. What has changed is who may read them. Disclosure is now handled by request, with a reason, rather than by publication, and requests from parties with a legitimate interest, including law enforcement and rights holders, are considered case by case.

RDAP, the replacement

The mechanism itself was also modernised. RDAP, the registration data access protocol, has taken over from the older WHOIS service. For an ordinary reader the practical differences are small but real: results are structured consistently rather than formatted differently by every registry, the character handling is reliable for names and addresses that are not plain English, and the protocol supports authenticated access, so a party entitled to see more can be shown more through the same channel.

Most registrars and registries offer a lookup form on their own websites, and those forms now query RDAP behind the scenes. For most purposes the distinction never surfaces.

What can still be established

A lookup remains one of the most useful five minutes available to a committee, because the facts that survive redaction are largely the ones that matter operationally:

• Whether the name is registered at all, which distinguishes a name that is free from one that is merely parked.
• The registrar of record, which is the party to write to about anything practical.
• The creation date, which shows how long the name has been held and by extension how established the holder is.
• The expiry date, which shows when the next decision point falls.
• The status codes, which show whether the name is locked, pending transfer, in a redemption period or suspended.
• The nameservers, which show whether the name is pointed at a live service or at nothing.

Those six facts answer the question a group usually has. A choir that wants to know why its address stopped working can often see the answer in the status codes and the expiry date before contacting anybody, and the meaning of each stage is set out in renewals and expiry.

Reading the dates properly

Two mistakes recur. The first is reading the last updated date as a change of ownership. It moves whenever anything on the record changes, including a routine renewal or a nameserver edit, so it proves very little. The second is treating a distant expiry date as evidence of commitment. A long registration says the holder paid for a long term, nothing more, and names registered for many years at once are abandoned as readily as any other.

Status codes reward a moment's attention. A code indicating a client hold or a pending delete tells a very different story from one indicating a routine transfer lock, and the codes are written in plain enough language to be understood without a manual.

Reaching a holder whose details are hidden

Redaction has not made holders unreachable. Most registries and registrars publish an anonymised contact address or a web form that forwards a message to the registrant, and messages sent through those routes do arrive. What has gone is the ability to look somebody up and address them by name, which changes how a first approach should be written. That is a subject of its own, covered in approaching an owner.