[ARIN-consult] Consultation on the Future of ARIN’s Directory Services (Updated)

[John Curran]

On Aug 31, 2026, at 11:37 AM, Adam Thompson <athompson at merlin.mb.ca> wrote:
...
Per my previous comment, I think it would be very useful to see the query type breakdown - my suspicion is that 99+% of all queries are "simple" bare-word queries, and that could potentially be re-implemented with a fairly simple wrapper without a massive effort.

Adam -

We took a look, and your intuition is largely right – approximately 79% of Whois queries are IP addresses, 10% ASNs, 9% organizations, and only 2% other query types.

We also looked at query sources. Interestingly, all of the top ten queriers over the same seven-day period are coming from AWS addresses, so we have little visibility into the actual organizations behind the traffic.

On the wrapper idea, ARIN has done something similar before, and our engineering view is that developing, testing, and operating a new compatibility layer would likely be more effort and operational risk than simply maintaining the existing Whois service for longer period (e.g. until RDAP becomes dominant)

This is also driven by the notification challenges as mentioned earlier; we’ve considered adding banners to whois output but they’re unlikely to be effective if parsed by automated systems processing the output.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers


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