WHOIS
WHO’S WHO?
Whois searches enable users to establish who owns, or controls, what on the Internet. Susan Prosser of DomainTools brings TB&I up to date on how it works
What is whois and why does it exist?
Whois is a protocol for recording a domain registrant and its contact information. In the Internet’s early days contact records existed for purely technical reasons, enabling you to track down someone if a domain was having technical issues. As the Internet was so new, users needed an easy way to contact each other and understand who was running what. Now, in 2012, it’s important to note that we are trying to adapt a very old and narrowly conceived standard to much broader uses.
Why does DomainTools see value in whois data?
In the so-called ‘thin’ whois data model—used by .com and .net—registrant data is stored locally at the registrar. T ere are more than 1,000 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)-accredited registrars
worldwide.
Under the thin model, a whois search gives only the registrar, name servers and registration dates.
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‘T ick’ data models, which are used by most generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and some country-code top-level domains, store whois data at the registry level. A search under a thick model will supply all the necessary information on who owns the domain, where it is registered, what name servers it uses, when it was registered and when it may expire.
DomainTools saw real value in searching across all of these disparately-stored whois records in one place, and set upon that challenge more than 10 years ago. Whois data inform people in industries such as online security and trademark enforcement.
How does the difference between the ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ whois models affect your work?
T e ‘thick’ model is more regulated than the ‘thin’ model—the data is centralised, with the registry having to store it. T e data formatting is very standardised in the ‘thick’ model. With the ‘thin’ model, registrars have a lot of leeway
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in how they format the data in response to a whois query. Normalising data across the great breadth of ‘thin’-model output formats is one of the harder challenges in our business.
How do your services benefi t intellectual property (IP) owners?
IP owners value our experience in collecting data. Going back 10 years, IP owners
can
track the use of various domains, particularly those that have been cybersquatted, using our whois history tool. Another big benefi t is the historical research that you can do with reverse whois, which pulls together associated domains with the same data element. Brands use our services to support their research in defending a cybersquatting case or trying to track down the owner of a domain name.
What is whois privacy?
Whois privacy is an arrangement between a domain owner and either the holding registrar or a related proxy service. To avoid giving
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