Summary

  • ARIN is consulting on retiring Whois-RWS, RWhois and Port 43 Whois while keeping RDAP as its single standardized directory protocol.
  • The dates are earliest planning boundaries, not final shutdown commitments: each transition has its own notice, parity, outreach or conversion-tool dependency.
  • Protocol retirement does not itself delete registration data, transfer number-resource rights or establish anything about live BGP operation.

Three clocks, three dependencies

ARIN opened its consultation on 14 August 2026 and asked for responses by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on 14 September. The proposal begins from a familiar maintenance problem: ARIN currently supports Whois-RWS, RWhois, traditional Whois over Port 43 and RDAP. Keeping four ways to expose overlapping registration information increases operational overhead and attack surface. ARIN’s preferred destination is RDAP, the HTTP- and JSON-based Internet Standard.

The proposal does not put all legacy services behind one switch. Whois-RWS, RWhois and Port 43 Whois have distinct dependencies and migration problems, so ARIN describes three independent retirement paths.

For the Whois-RWS API, ARIN proposes a 180-day customer-outreach programme. Its web interface would remain until equivalent RDAP-backed query capability is ready. ARIN also says it would give at least 30 days’ notice before retiring that interface. The consultation does not specify exactly how visitors to the existing web address would experience the eventual change.

RWhois has a deeper data-migration dependency. ARIN says it would recommend an open-source RDAP server and provide a conversion tool for existing RWhois data. Only when that tool exists would the proposed 365-day sunset clock begin. A date printed on a planning table cannot replace those prerequisites.

Port 43 Whois receives the longest runway. ARIN proposes a two-year sunset period and outreach beyond the ARIN community. The consultation does not enumerate which organizations or public-interest users still depend on that interface, so migration owners should discover those dependencies rather than assume them.

Earliest dates are not final shutdown dates

ARIN lists Whois-RWS as retiring on or after 1 July 2027, RWhois no sooner than 1 January 2028, and Port 43 Whois on or after 1 January 2029. The qualifying language matters. “On or after” is a boundary, not a promise that service will stop on that morning. RWhois is explicitly tied to an uncompleted migration tool. The consultation itself is still open at this article’s evidence cutoff.

Operators should therefore preserve two kinds of dates. The first is ARIN’s stated earliest boundary. The second is the actual notice or dependency event that starts a migration clock. Treating the first as a final deadline risks either panic work or complacency. A client may be ready before ARIN acts, while another may discover that a workflow relies on output formatting, referral behavior, rate handling or local data that needs deliberate conversion.

The data and the access protocol are different layers

ARIN’s directory services expose registration information about IP number resources, autonomous system numbers, organizations, customers and points of contact. RDAP changes the query and response contract: it uses HTTP, structured JSON, standardized object models, bootstrap discovery and defined security behavior. That is a material technical change for software, even when the underlying registration fact is intended to remain available.

It is equally important not to overstate what the migration means. Moving a query from a Whois-RWS or Port 43 client to an RDAP client does not by itself change the meaning of an allocation, assignment, ASN or contact record, and it establishes nothing about live BGP operation. The proposal is about directory access infrastructure.

The practical evidence rule is simple: record the protocol, endpoint, query, retrieval time and response. During migration, preserve both the old and new result when comparing parity. Differences can arise from display, referrals, field naming, truncation or source-registry behavior. A discrepancy should be investigated before either representation is treated as missing truth.

Sources