Question about Whois control?

[csmaster2005]

I got a question that I'm hoping someone can answer.
Who/what organization offically maintains all the whois records?

Also, if I wanted to do MASS whois (For MANY, MANY domains (millions) who/what/where would I goto to do this without getting my servers ip blocked?
This isnt for spam, but rather part of my upcoming major site I'm working on

 

[Anthony]

The registries for each of the extensions officially maintains those records.

The only way I know of enabling millions of whois lookups would be to partner with a domain registrar.

 

[csmaster2005]

well partnering with a domain registrar would only give me the whois for that specific registrar.
What about this, if I wanted to get the creation/expiration date of domains, for millions of domains, how would I do that?

 

[armstrong]

download the official com/net domain list (called the zone file ) from verisign - http://www.verisign.com/nds/naming/tld/

note that you need a static IP to do this ...

 

[csmaster2005]

I already have that.
But I need to add the creation/expiration date of all those domains into my database, and thus need some sort of method to query it, which is why I posted this

 

[Anthony]

Well, if you have the zone files, then I guess you need to find a script of some sort to parse it like the snapping services use. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[csmaster2005]

err
I'm a programmer, I already wrote a script to parse the zone files to what I need and plug them into my database.
What I need to do is get creation date and expiration date for all of the domains, but want to find the place that I can query for the expiration date without getting my ip banned for doing too many queries.