Summary

  • ARIN reported that IP addresses made up about 79% of Whois queries in one seven-day period; ASNs accounted for 10%, organizations 9% and other types 2%.
  • The same sample’s ten most active queriers all came from AWS addresses. ARIN said it had little visibility into the organizations behind them, so the figures do not establish a user count or migration readiness.

A query mix, with an identity gap

The figures appeared in an exchange on ARIN’s public consultation about the future of its directory services. On 31 August, president and CEO John Curran answered a request for a query-type breakdown with the four approximate shares. He also said the top ten queriers in that same seven-day period were coming from AWS addresses, leaving ARIN with little visibility into the actual organizations behind the traffic.

That is a useful operational snapshot, but a narrow one. The percentages classify requests by what was queried; they do not show how many requests there were, how many distinct clients or organizations generated them, or whether the same users rely on Whois in critical workflows. ARIN did not state the sample’s calendar dates. Nor does the breakdown measure the syntax of a query: it does not establish what share were the “simple” searches raised in the discussion.

The distinction matters because ARIN’s 14 August proposal was about moving older directory services toward RDAP. An observed query mix can help describe the service’s workload. It cannot, by itself, tell ARIN whom to contact, which software needs adaptation, or how much time a migration requires. A cloud-provider address is a source observation, not a count of customer organizations; Curran’s reply explicitly leaves that mapping unresolved.

ARIN also described the operational trade-off. It said a new compatibility layer could take more effort and carry more risk than keeping Whois available longer, while a notice embedded in output might miss systems that parse responses automatically. The consultation closed on 14 September. ARIN said it was reviewing comments and would report planned next steps at ARIN 58 and on its website. The meeting agenda schedules a directory-services roadmap session for 23 October; the agenda does not disclose what ARIN will decide or publish.

Sources

Curran’s 31 August reply with the query mix; ARIN’s earlier response on collecting statistics; the consultation proposal, closure notice and ARIN 58 agenda.