What WHOIS shows
A WHOIS query reaches the database of a registrar or the registry of a top-level domain and returns information about a single name: the owner's contacts, the registration and renewal dates, the domain's status codes and its assigned name servers. Historically this data was fully public and helped people reach domain administrators.
Privacy and RDAP
Today personal data is increasingly hidden:
- Redaction — because of GDPR, registrars hide contacts behind a privacy proxy or a Redacted for Privacy note.
- ICANN rules — the disclosure policy is coordinated by ICANN, so the set of public fields differs between zones.
- RDAP successor — the plain-text WHOIS is being replaced by RDAP, which returns structured JSON and supports tiered access.
Checking WHOIS is useful before buying a domain — it shows whether the name is free and when the current registration expires.
