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That's because you shouldn't be querying them directly, all they tell you is what server(s) deal with ".com" or ".net" (or ".tv", etc...)

Try using A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET instead, foo.

(Side note: *.root-servers.net is operated by the NSI Registry division, not the Registrar division.)

IDN should help with at least one barrier, multilingual domain names.

d

For those who are interested in IDN, here are some URL.

IETF IDN WG
http://www.i-d-n.net/

NSI Registry Testbed
http://www.nsiregistry.com/

i-DNS.net (Technology Provider for NSI ML.com testbed)
http://www.i-DNS.net/

Multilingual.COM Promotion
http://we-multilingual.com/

$1,000 US ICANN application fee

$5,000 US ICANN annual fee

$70,000 US in working capital

not to mention...

$10,000 US NSI registration fee

$100,000 US performance assurance bond

and even after all that trouble, NSI will take $9 US from every registration I were to put through! It's nice to have a say in who gets to go through, and to perhaps bring NSI back down to earth.

This has brought my conclusion to going through the Tucows OpenSRS system, which is a free registration and free perl based CGI's, through which I can register domains for a simple $10 US per year ($9 of which goes to NSI, $1 going to Tucows for providing us with this great service).

Some more links for those of you ready to become your own registrar:

http://www.iana.org/

http://www.icann.org/

http://www.ietf.org/

http://www.nsiregistry.com/

http://www.internic.net/

Good luck! I hope everyone helps contribute to the OpenSRS project, as it will certainly be the way of the future for small ISP's like myself who can't afford NSI's outrageous costs and bonds.

- EraseMe

http://www.nsiregistry.com/ is the place to check domain names from now on.
It provides NSI and CORE WHOIS lookups in one place. It will not give complete doamin info, but it will tell you where to look if the domain is taken.
And yes, don't mention domains til ya get 'em. I never thought kabong.com would get taken, but someone did, because they also registered kabang.com (.net .org, same as kabong), a real lame-ass e-commerce site.
I didn't want to hassle them to get kabong.com from them, so I settled on donutloaf.com.
Remember: There's always room for DonutLoaf!!!

Pope

What many people don't realize is that domain name registrar competition is largely illusory. NSI still holds a monopoly for the database holding the com, org, and net top level domains. All the other registrars still pay NSI $9/year per domain for access to this database.

Thus, the only real competition is in billing and customer service. Given NSI's track record on these matters, the "alternative" registrars have a wide-open opportunity to do better, and I think this is a good thing. But the fact that NSI retains the monopoly on the database itself suggests that we're not going to see fundamental improvements any time soon.

First of their database is barely updated nowadays so your better off using their Shared Registration Service (SRS) database for queries here.

Secondly this should be unconstitutional being that the whois database is not theirs. Maybe they should advertise that and donate the money to ICANN ooops That'd probably hurt them more then it would help them since they seem to want to monopolize the Domain Registration business.

heh the John Gotti's of the Domain registration world.

Someone should wake them up from their domination fantasies. register.com registers more domain than they do.

Maybe they should join in the adverstising business and give NSI (network stupidity inc) a run for the monopolized cash.

home sweet home

I use NSIRegistry.Com which is the old plain vanilla Whois that used to be at InterNIC.Net. Here is a sample: Whois Slashdot.Org. Maybe I should post this as a story!

The base registry information (basically, the name servers for the domain and who the responsible registrar is) is available separately from NSI's whois, on a web page at www.nsiregistry.com. I'm not sure whether I think their consequent hijacking of the rs.internic.net whois gateway that all our whois commands point to by default is good, but at least in the open source community we can fix that problem quickly if we decide to. On the other hand, since NSI is probably not going to be running the registry long term, 'nsiregistry.com' is an odd choice of domain name.

We are a long way from this multiple-registrar stuff working smoothly!! But, in the long run I think it will be better than what we have now. The transition is going to be painful and confusing, though.

--BitDancer

Actually, NSI has hidden the "real" whois, fancy free at http://www.nsiregistry.com which is basically the old WHOIS we got at http://www.internic.net and NSIregistry does not have that copyright notice. Example: WHOIS Slashdot.Org

Actually, NSI has hidden the "real" whois, fancy free at http://www.nsiregistry.com which is basically the old WHOIS we got at http://www.internic.net and NSIregistry does not have that copyright notice. Example: WHOIS Slashdot.Org