Elizabeth Feinler and her team (who had created the Resource Directory for ARPANET) were responsible for creating … See more

The WHOIS protocol had its origin in the ARPANET NICNAME protocol and was based on the NAME/FINGER Protocol, described in RFC 742 (1977). The NICNAME/WHOIS protocol was first described in … See more

WHOIS lookups were traditionally performed with a command line interface application, but now many alternative web-based tools exist.
A WHOIS database consists of a set of text records for … See more

WHOIS services are mainly run by registrars and registries; for example the Public Interest Registry (PIR) maintains the .ORG registry and associated WHOIS service.
WHOIS ser… See more

Normally the contact information of the resources assignee is returned. However, some registrars offer private registration, in which case the contact information of the registrar is shown instead.
Some regis… See more

Referral Whois (RWhois) is an extension of the original WHOIS protocol and service. RWhois extends the concepts of WHOIS in a scalable, hierarchical fashion, potentially creating a system with a tree-like architectur… See more

One criticism of WHOIS is the lack of full access to the data. Few parties have realtime access to the complete databases.
Others cite the competing goal of domain privacy as a criticism, although this problem is strongly … See more