[dbwg] whois referral to RIPE

Dear ARIN / dbwg,

ARIN has recently altered the way it refers queries to
RIPE, and has ceased putting "whois.ripe.net" in a
comment when queried for a RIPE IP number. ARIN now
gives ONLY the URL http://www.ripe.net/whois (in a
comment). Why has the pointer to the port 43 whois
been removed?

For APNIC, ARIN's comment contains:

 Comment:    For details, refer to the APNIC Whois
Database via
 Comment:    WHOIS.APNIC.NET or
http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois2.pl

For LACNIC:

 Comment: Please see http://www.lacnic.net/ for
further details,
 Comment: or check the WHOIS server located at
whois.lacnic.net

For RIPE:

 Comment: These addresses have been further assigned
to users in
 Comment: the RIPE NCC region. Contact information can
be found
 Comment: in the RIPE database at
http://www.ripe.net/whois

My question is then, why does ARIN now behave
differently for RIPE ?
Why is there no longer any mention of whois.ripe.net ?

Note further that CRSNic.net has a field in their
output that looks
like:
   Whois Server: whois.[someserver].com
which a program can detect, and direct itself to. Why
don't the RIRs
do the same?

I would suggest that ARIN should provide an
easy-to-detect "Whois Server" field, or at the very
least, a consistent reference to to the appropriate
RIR's whois, including RIPE in its "Comment" fields.

thank you,



=====
John Bro <whoisproxy at yahoo.com>
http://wp-whois-proxy.sourceforge.net/

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