Coming

The Whois is dead.
Long live .whoswho!

The big news for 2021 continues to be our ongoing collaboration with the .whoswho generic Top Level Domain and others at The i.whoswho Project, in order to develop an Internet infrastructure project as a free service for Internet users worldwide.

This functional proof of concept also allows any public Internet user to simply append ".whoswho" to any registered domain name in their browsers' address bar, hit Enter, and instantly view both legacy Whois data and recently-introduced Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) information on their desktops. For example, the following URLs are constructed by adding ".whoswho" to registered domain names.

• apple.com.whoswho delivers currently-available information showing Apple Inc. as domain holder
• wipo.int.whoswho delivers currently-available information showing World Intellectual Property Organization as domain holder
• pbs.org.whoswho delivers currently-available information showing Public Broadcasting Service as domain holder

Although information disclosure has been hobbled by the European Union-legislated GDRP (General Data Registration Protection), leading to a complete blocking of such information until the EU provides greater clarity, a return to publication of information useful to the user community is anticipated, especially for corporate entities whose data does not require suppression under the terms of the GDRP, but has been redacted by registrars currently in an excess of caution.

Presently placing such publicly-available DNS (domain name system) information at the top of each output page, users are provided clickable links to records containing important information including canonical name records (CNAME), name servers records (NS), and mail exchange records (MX), etc. Where the legacy Whois and RDAP data are concerned, once the European Union clarifies its positions with regard to GDRP and the yardsticks by which compliance may be measured, more fulsome information will be published - rather than redacted - from both the legacy Whois and newly-specified RDAP repositories.

Only when public users are conveniently able to load domain registration data onto their screens can they begin to critically analyze the contents of messages and webpages by verifying their source. While the range of information displayed to users will continue to expand as part of The i.whoswho Project, the simplicity and ease-of-use that appending ".whoswho" to a registered domain name is expected to draw a growing base of users in the years ahead. To which we proclaim: The Whois is dead. Long live .whoswho!