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What is the history of WHOIS?

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When the Internet was emerging out of the ARPANET body, DARPA was the only one organization that handled all domain registrations. WHOIS was standardized in the early 1980s to look-up domains, people and other resources related to domain and number registrations. Because all registration was done by one organization in that time, one centralized server was used for WHOIS queries. This made looking-up information very easy.

Early WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. For example, one could do a WHOIS lookup on a person's last name and get all the individual people who had a registered handle. You could do a search on a keyword and see all registered domains containing that keyword. You could even search a given administrative contact and see all domains they were associated with. However, due to the advent of the commercialized Internet, multiple registrars and unethical spammers, such permissive searching is no longer available.

Initially, while ARPANET faded away in the late 1980s, responsibility of domain registration remained with DARPA. Soon, UUNet began offering domain registration service, however they simply handled the paperwork for you and still had to deal with DARPA's Network Information Center (NIC). Then the National Science Foundation aimed at getting management of Internet domain registration to be handled by commercial, 3rd party entities. InterNIC was formed in 1993 under contract with the NSF, consisting of Network Solutions, Inc., General Atomics, and AT&T. General Atomics' contract was cancelled after several years due to performance issues.

On December 1, 1999, management of .com, .net, and .org was turned over to ICANN and everything was switched to a thin WHOIS model. Existing WHOIS clients stopped working at that time. A month later it had self-detecting CGI support so that the same program could operate a web-based WHOIS lookup, and an external TLD table to support multiple whois servers based on the TLD of the request. This eventually became the model of the modern WHOIS.

Currently, there are many more generic top-level domains than there were in the early 1980s. There are also many, many more country-code top-level domains. This has led to a complex network of domain name registrars and registrar associations, especially as the management of Internet infrastructure has become more internationalized. As such, performing a WHOIS query on a domain requires knowing the correct, authoritative WHOIS server to use. Tools to do WHOIS proxy searches have become common, and there's a command-line WHOIS which uses a configuration file to map-out domain names and network blocks to their appropriate registrar.

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