The .whoswho gTLD

May 23rd, 2023

My friend discovered something interesting with domain names. If you append .whoswho to the end of any domain, it will give you a WHOIS lookup. But... How does this work? Since when was .whosho a gTLD? How does it work with (almost) every domain?

An example .whoswho lookup.

Just from the webpage alone, we can see the homepage is http://i.whoswho. Going to their homepage reveals the WHOIS lookup website is "a proof-of-concept project to demonstrate how domain name registration information can be made accessible to the users who are not lawyers or technical experts". Other than this, the website doesn't tell who owns or runs it.

Looking at IANA's Root Zone Database, we can see .whoswho is, infact, a gTLD and is owned by the Who's Who Registry. The homepage for the Who's Who Registry is located at http://internet.whoswho. This website shows that the registry itself is responsible for this tool. Their website also explains that the tool is in "Beta", which is why the tool only works with HTTP, but will soon support HTTPS. Their webpage also has some social media, the platforms being LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Strangely enough, their LinkedIn seems abandoned, their Facebook is private / deleted, but their Twitter is still up.

Looking for more answers, I found the website http://whoswho.com, which report in their About section:

The Whois is dead. Long live .whoswho!

The big news for 2021 continues to be our ongoing collaboration with the .whoswho generic Top Level Domain and others at The i.whoswho Project, in order to develop an Internet infrastructure project as a free service for Internet users worldwide.

Digging further, the ICANNWiki shows that this gTLD was registered in 2014. According to nTLD Stats, this gTLD started gaining use in 2020, as 800 new domains were created under the gTLD.

This website is a pretty neat trick. The Who's Who Registry owns all of the domains of popular gTLDs and redirects them to the tool, using the subdomain as the original website's name. In most cases, you will be able to access this website from any popular website by using the gTLD.