ARIN Directory Services Roadmap#

Hollis Kara (ARIN, Director of Communications)

• Why: Directory-data consolidation onto RDAP touches the PM's directory/identity instincts, and the Port 43 WHOIS debate is a live case study in legacy-protocol retirement politics — relevant to anyone whose tooling still scripts whois.
• What: Outcome of a community consultation on retiring three legacy services in favor of RDAP as ARIN's single directory protocol. RWhois: uncontested, retiring on a 365-day countdown after a migration tool ships. Whois-RWS: uncontested in principle, API sunset set for July 2026/2027 path (July 2027 per deck), gated on RDAP closing one parity gap (CIDR more-specifics / hierarchy walking); web UI to run in parallel with a beta Advanced RDAP Search for ~6 months. Port 43 WHOIS: real opposition — of 43 substantive comments, 24 opposed or wanted a much longer transition (56% against), 11 supported, 8 neutral — so ARIN paused and will reconsult once RDAP clients ship by default in OS distributions.
• How: Analysis grounded in actual query traffic (79% IP lookups, 9% ASN, 10% org) and a candid visibility caveat: the top queriers all resolve to cloud provider addresses, so ARIN can't see the real end users. Engineering judged a WHOIS-compatible proxy in front of RDAP to cost more operational risk than keeping native WHOIS running longer — the reason the proxy compromise was rejected.
• Where applicable: Anyone with scripts or products querying ARIN directory data. The security argument (unauthenticated, unencrypted, MITM-tamperable) vs. the ecosystem-readiness argument (RDAP clients not yet default in OS distros) is the transferable lesson for any forced protocol migration.