Micah LeeDec 30, 2022
Is the authoritative source of WHOIS data stored with the registrar that a domain name is registered with, or some other organization?
Show thread~nDec 30, 2022
@micahflee It's almost like DNS, just with fewer layers/intermediaries. IANA delegates whois authority to the operators of each TLD. Your whois client either has that list or recurses from whois,iana,org
I'm not entirely sure if this exists but for some TLDs the registry in charge can refer to the whois service of providers that sell domains under that TLD.
Show threadClipperChip Dec 30, 2022
@nblr @micahflee That's a better reply :)
Show thread~nDec 30, 2022
@clipperchip @micahflee
Sometimes I'm really glad to be given the opportunity to whip out some of my niche-knowledge from the Internet's machine room. The stuff that's entirely useless for daily life. :-)
Show threadClipperChip Dec 30, 2022
@nblr @micahflee My time at c't sure helped with that, too. I suspected this is how it works since I know that DeNIC is the authoritative source for .de domains. I just wasn't sure enough about other TLDs.
Show thread~n

@clipperchip @micahflee
Most whois clients have a list, so usually IANA is not queried, but there is this delegation mechanism to discover/recurse. Basically what whois does is returning a key/value printout of all properties of a domain (in this sense "org" is a domain too)

The "whois:" field points towards the responsible whois server while other fields contain the usual whois stuff like "name:" "organization:" etc.

Dec 30, 2022 at 12:54amWeb