Why has ICAAN removed Whois?

[MTB]

I make regular use of the Whois search on the ICANN.org site. Yesterday I noticed they removed the Whois box on the main sub menu and buried it in the footer at the bottom of the site. It's really annoying...

Why would ICANN do this?

1 Oct screenshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20191001103448/https://www.icann.org/
9 Oct screenshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20191007075933/https://www.icann.org/

 

[WatchDogue]

Glad you asked that question.

Have been using their WHOIS for years and in the past month+ have been unable to load/access
their " https://lookup.icann.org" page.

Just tried again to get to that page now listed under their HELP section with no success and thought perhaps it was a browser ( mine ) issue.

 

[MTB]

Definitely changed in the past week. I can think of only three reasons:

1. Low usage - ICANN doesn't think it's a useful service
   
2. High usage - ICANN wants to save money on server fees
3. Error - Tech accidentally removed the navigation link

 

[Soofi]

under GDRP, ICANN will hide most of the relevant info from whois, so whats the point?

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Forget ICANN and various 3rd parties...
Check WHOIS at corresponding TLD Registry (root DB) and then at Registrar (local DB)...
Or under Linux: whois example.tld

 

[xxxSxxx]

Its working perfect, from here .
lookup.icann.org/lookup

 

[Ore]

Because they CANN.
Why do you even rely on web-based whois, you can use "whois something.com" on almost any Linux distribution...

 

[Storm]

In the case of Windows, a small whois utility can be downloaded from docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/whois. Read the instructions regarding the usage and the Windows versions needed before downloading.

After downloading :

1. Extract the compressed archive to a folder (e.g., to a directory in your system path, c:\windows\system32),
2. Open Windows command prompt (cmd.exe),
3. For a test, go ahead and type whois namepros.com then press Enter

This should return the whois query result to the command prompt terminal.

You can replace the domain name with an IP address or change the domain name extension as needed (you may need a specific whois server to query against).

In case you find the output unpleasant to read, you may send the output to a text file providing a path if needed:

whois namepros.com > namepros.txt