CNNIC To Implement Alternative WHOIS

CNNIC, the .cn registry, are to implement an alternative to traditional whois.

According to an announcement by ICANN’s Kurt Pritz, the Chinese organisation will be implementing a “RESTful” Whois server implementation.

This is based on ongoing work within the IETF in the rather oddly named “weirds” project. Of course “weirds” is actually an acronym for:

“Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service”

What’s it all about?

Essentially the current whois servers have issues with internationalised data ie. they can’t really handle non-Latin characters. There’s also quite a few other technical and policy limitations that standard / traditional whois server implementations run into.

ARIN has already implemented a RESTful service.