The WhoIs Protocol as Critical and Creative Practice

Beginning with a “ghost” internet protocol address once registered to an American tech company based in Ireland, this presentation focuses on ongoing artistic research into the WhoIs protocol as public directory and archive, incorporating outcomes from a residency at the Media Archaeology Lab (University of Colorado Boulder). WhoIs refers to the protocols, services and data types associated with Internet naming and numbering resources (icann.org, 2024).It contains hundreds of millions of entries including domain name registration and expiry dates, details of technical administrators, IP addresses of name servers, and other technical information (Muller, 2002).

However, WhoIs has limitations. The information it offers contains inaccuracies and inconsistencies (Gañán, 2016), and recent supranational privacy legislation, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has restricted the availability of personal registration data. In 2015, ICANN introduced the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) as a replacement for WhoIs, designed to provide more secure access, increased standardisation, improved usability, and greater support for internationalisation (icann.org, 2024). As such, the WhoIs Protocol can be considered an endangered conceptual world within our current algorithmic era.

Critical internet resources such as IP addresses and domain names carry significant “technical, economic, and political implications” (DeNardis, 2009), raising concerns regarding governance, accessibility, and distribution among institutions, nation-states, and commercial actors. The allocation and documentation of these resources within WhoIs provide insight into the global infrastructure of the internet, past and present, while also recalling the “rigidly defined hierarchies” around which networked systems are structured (Galloway, 2004). This presentation outlines creative and critical methods to engage and preserve the WhoIs protocol.