ARIN Directory Services#
ARIN 56 Public Policy and Members Meeting digest Program Core pick 30–31 October 2025
Mark Kosters, Chief Technology Officer, ARIN
- Why: ARIN runs four redundant directory services (Whois port 43, RWhois, Whois-RWS, RDAP) and is preparing a consultation to retire three of them. If your security tooling, abuse workflows, or automation still hits port 43 or the whois.arin.net REST API, this is a deprecation notice in embryo.
- What: ARIN proposes retiring RWhois (a 2013 community suggestion, requirement already removed from the NRPM but users remain — the migration path is RDAP, possibly with an ARIN-built translation tool, or pushing reassignment data into ARIN's database), retiring the Whois-RWS API (web front end would move to an RDAP backend), and eventually retiring Whois port 43 itself. Context: since ICANN dropped the Whois requirement for gTLDs in January 2025, at least 139 gTLDs have shut theirs off; usage is falling on the domain side of the industry.
- How: Consolidation on RDAP (RFC 7480–7485, 9224), which has defined queries/results, 26 client implementations, 11 authoritative server implementations, UTF-8, auth support, and emerging extensions for geolocation and RPKI registration data. A formal ARIN consultation is forthcoming.
- Where applicable: Broadly applicable to anyone consuming registry data programmatically; org-specific urgency depends on whether you run RWhois for delegated reassignments or have scripts against port 43 / Whois-RWS.