On December 1, 1999, management of the top-level domains (TLDs) com, net, and org was assigned to ICANN. Since the advent of the commercialized Internet, multiple registrars and unethical spammers, such permissive searching is no longer available. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with.

A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. The General Atomics contract was canceled after several years due to performance issues.Ģ0th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. InterNIC was formed in 1993 under contract with the NSF, consisting of Network Solutions, Inc., General Atomics and AT&T. Then the National Science Foundation directed that management of Internet domain registration would be handled by commercial, third-party entities. UUNET began offering domain registration service however, they simply handled the paperwork which they forwarded to the DARPA Network Information Center (NIC). Responsibility of domain registration remained with DARPA as the ARPANET became the Internet during the 1980s. This made looking up such information very easy.Īt the time of the emergence of the internet from the ARPANET, the only organization that handled all domain registrations was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States government (created during 1958. As all registration was done by one organization at that time, one centralized server was used for WHOIS queries. WHOIS was standardized in the early 1980s to look up domains, people, and other resources related to domain and number registrations.

The process of registration was established in RFC 920. She and the team created domains, with Feinler's suggestion that domains be divided into categories based on the physical address of the computer. Feinler set up a server in Stanford's Network Information Center (NIC) which acted as a directory that could retrieve relevant information about people or entities. JSTOR ( February 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Įlizabeth Feinler and her team (who had created the Resource Directory for ARPANET) were responsible for creating the first WHOIS directory in the early 1970s.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

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