prop-167: Published Statistics on Directory Service Usage

Proposal text prop-167-v002
Objective

This proposal suggests to provide APNIC members and stakeholders with visibility into the use of WHOIS and RDAP services.

Current status To be discussed at APNIC 60
Authors

Jonathan Brewer

Relevant forum Policy SIG
Previous versions prop-167-v001
Secretariat impact assessment

This Impact assessment is for prop-167-v001

APNIC Secretariat is aware that a updated version has since been published and are currently reviewing the initial assessment in the context of the updated proposal.

1. APNIC’s Understanding of the Proposed Policy

This Policy Proposal would require APNIC to provide Resource Holders and other stakeholders with visibility into the use of WHOIS and RDAP services.

APNIC would publish the Statistics about directory services usage to include the following data points:

  • The number of queries received by the WHOIS and RDAP services broken down by:

    • Source Autonomous System Number (ASN) (For at least the top 1000 ASNs)

    • Source IP address Per ASN

    • Service (WHOIS vs. RDAP)

    • Include Metadata such as query type and method

The Data should be updated hourly and be published in a machine readable format such as JSON or CSV

2. Impact of Proposed Policy on Registry and Addressing System

There is no impact expected on the Registry and Addressing systems

3. Impact of Proposed Policy on APNIC Operation/Services

There is a medium level of impact on the Software teams. This data is already available to our technical teams for internal use.
APNIC will have to develop a method for extracting and publishing the requested data.

No Service Level Agreement (SLA) will be attached to the data availability and the data will be published on a “Best-Effort” basis.

4. Legal Impact of Policy

APNIC is currently developing an enhanced privacy compliance program which will culminate in a revised Privacy Statement. The collection and publication of this usage data, if the Proposed Policy reaches consensus, it will be factored into this program and the resulting updated Privacy Statement.

APNIC will implement terms of use for these services in the future and will take into account this tracking and reporting as part of the development of such terms.

5. Implementation

If this Policy Proposal reaches consensus, the implementation time frame would be approximately 3 months subject to the call for editorial comments period.

Proposal history
05 August 2025 Version 1 posted to the Policy SIG mailing list for community discussion.
15 August 2025 Impact Analysis published and posted to the Policy SIG mailing list for community discussion.
21 August 2025 Version 2 posted to the Policy SIG mailing list for community discussion.