Whois.ca - Does it still have value with whois pretty well locked down (1 Viewing)

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Does whois.ca still have any value now that whois is pretty much useless?

I mean you use whois at cira and you pretty much don't need any other whois service for .ca
 
Of course you or I would never use it. And the general public has probably never even heard of WHOIS or CIRA. However, those who have some vague knowledge might think to try whois.ca before cira.ca. The general public probably goes to their registrar first, if they already have one, or google "how to register a domain" and wind up at google domains or godaddy...

That being said, I wouldn't mind owning whois.ca personally.
 
I don't think he's talking about whois in general, just the domain name whois.ca.

Yeah, whois used to be a pretty good business until they locked it down.
Now other than a free service here and there its pretty much been rendered useless.

@silentg - yes domainers find some of the non hidden aspects useful but joe public does not and I bet traffic for most whois services is down significantly.
 
Domain probably would hold the most value to a Canadian domain registrar, who could use it for lead generation (for products and services related to domains).
 
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In the ICANN world whois is going to be replaced by RDAP in the coming years, slowly but surely. Eventually ccTLDs will likely follow. The transition to de-emphasize whois has just started. I usually query it in a shell/CMD.
 
So what's the status of RDAP? Seems way behind based on this:

Registration Data Access Protocol Timeline - ICANN
It looks like they haven't updated it in a while. The stakeholders just voted on the amendments (which make the availability of RDAP more important than whois):

2023 Global Amendments to the Base gTLD Registry Agreement (RA), Specification 13, and 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) - ICANN

I believe now it's at least another 18 months or so before whois can be wound down - I can't find the correct timeline anywhere.
 

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