Summary

  • ARIN’s August plan put Port 43 WHOIS on a two-year retirement track, with an earliest date of 1 January 2029. Its stated prize was one standard directory service, RDAP, and less operational overhead.
  • In the October response signed by John Curran, Port 43 stays while ARIN watches RDAP adoption and query traffic. ARIN’s meeting recap says 24 of 43 substantive comments opposed retirement or wanted much more time.

An old socket earns another shift

A registry can retire a service on a slide. Retiring its users takes longer. ARIN’s August proposal described four directory protocols—Whois-RWS, RWhois, Port 43 WHOIS and RDAP—and a future with RDAP alone. Fewer overlapping services meant less maintenance and a smaller attack surface. Port 43, the plain old query door, got a proposed two-year sunset and an earliest retirement date of 1 January 2029.

The proposal itself acknowledged the snag: Port 43 still handled a high volume of queries and served security investigators, researchers and law enforcement. Those users have tools, routines and dependencies, not just a nostalgic attachment to a command line. A standards-compliant replacement can be excellent and still arrive to find the chairs occupied.

The consultation ran from 14 August to 14 September. On 21 October, ARIN published Curran’s signed answer. Port 43 would keep running while ARIN measured RDAP uptake across commercial products and query traffic. Retirement would return for another consultation once prerequisites identified by the community had been met. His response gave no new date. It also did not explicitly cancel the earlier 2029 floor; a precise account needs both sentences.

At ARIN 58, the registry put a number on the resistance: 24 of 43 substantive comments opposed Port 43 retirement or asked for a much longer transition. That is ARIN’s classification of comments, not a referendum of Internet users. It is still enough to make the original timetable look lonely.

Curran did not place every old service in the same waiting room. RWhois gets a 365-day clock after a migration tool is public. The Whois-RWS API must first reach parity with RDAP, with documentation and training addressed. A beta RDAP advanced search will run alongside the old web interface for at least six months before a sunset date is set. Different dependencies, different clocks: that is what listening looks like when it reaches the operations calendar.

The Port 43 threshold remains the missing line in the ledger. ARIN has yet to publish a specific RDAP adoption level, traffic baseline or date for the next consultation in the cited outcome. Until it does, Curran’s decision is a concrete stay of retirement and an open test of migration, rather than a finished exit plan. The person who signed the original invitation to leave also signed the order to keep the door staffed.