I am looking for a domain name registrant. Where can I look it up?
The Whois is an easy-to-use tool for checking the availability of a .nl domain name. If the domain name is already taken, you can see who has registered it.
On the page looking up a domain name you will find more information about what a domain name is, how the Whois works and how the privacy of personal data is protected. Alternatively, you can go straight to look for a domain name via the Whois.
I would like to transfer my domain name to another registrar. What is the procedure?
To get your domain name transferred, you need the token (unique ID number) for your domain name. Your existing registrar has the token and is obliged to give it to you within five days, if you ask for it. The procedure for changing your registrar is described on the page transferring your domain name.
The details registered about me/my company are incorrect or out of date. How can I get them updated?
To update the contact details associated with your domain name, you need to contact your registrar. Read more about updating contact details.
Why is my domain name in quarantine?
When a domain name is cancelled, we aren't told the reason, so we can't tell you. You'll need to ask your registrar. The advantage of quarantine is that, if a name's cancelled by mistake, you can always get it back.
One common reason is that the contract between you and your registrar says you've got to renew the registration every year. If you haven't set up automatic renewal and you don't renew manually, the registration will expire.
Ik heb een klacht over mijn provider/registrar. Kan ik daarvoor bij SIDN terecht?
Wanneer je een klacht hebt over of een geschil met je registrar dan zijn er verschillende mogelijkheden om tot een oplossing te komen. Hierover lees je meer op pagina klacht over registrar. SIDN heeft geen formele klachtenprocedure voor het behandelen van een klacht over jouw registrar.
What conditions do I have to meet as a registrar?
Would you like to be able to register domain names for customers or for your own organisation by dealing directly with SIDN? If so, you can become a .nl registrar. Read more about the conditions and how to apply for registrar status on the page becoming a registrar.
Further subdivision of IPv4 address space could break up the internet
Tuesday 3 March 2020
The IPv4 era is definitively over. The original internet has become an asymmetrical infrastructure only capable of supporting client-server applications. And it may degenerate further: continued subdivision of the IPv4 address space could result in the internet fragmenting into isolated sectors. New market players such as Freedom Internet have real difficulty assembling a fully featured customer offering because of the need to invest in IPv4. What's more, two years of declining efficiency in utilisation of the IPv4 address space suggest that the elasticity afforded by innovative technical and organisational workarounds has reached its limit.
RIPE NCC sees infrastructure upgrades and new technology rollouts – 5G and the IoT, for example – as ideal opportunities for IPv6 implementation. The organisation also believes that the emergence of IPv6-only hosts in regions where no more IPv4 addresses are available may be an important driver of IPv6 adoption in the rest of the world.
Since RIPE NCC allocated the very last IPv4 address at the end of November, the only way for members to get addresses has been by going on a waiting list. Only members (LIRs) that haven't previously received any IPv4 address blocks are eligible for addresses through the waiting list system. Even then, only single /24 blocks of 256 addresses are available. The addresses in question are taken from blocks returned to RIPE NCC as a result of insolvencies and other unusual circumstances.
Returned IPv4 addresses are placed in quarantine for six months, then transferred to a recovery pool for re-issue. RIPE NCC expects the recovery mechanism to free up only a very small number of addresses for re-issue. In the words of Chris Buckridge, RIPE NCC's Head of External Relations, the supply is now more of a puddle than a pool. He envisages maybe 256,000 IPv4 addresses being made available from the pool in the current quarter.
However, with the going market rate for an IP address currently between $20 and $25, there's no incentive to incur the cost of joining the waiting list. Researcher Rene Wilhelm said recently that he expected RIPE NCC's bloated membership to fall by 4,500 over the next two years.
Deterrent to new players
Although IPv4 addresses are available on the open market, the price forms a deterrent to new market players. According to Anco Scholte ter Horst, CEO of Freedom Internet, it would be prohibitively expensive for his firm to buy the tens of thousands of IPv4 addresses required to offer customers a full dual-stack proposition from the outset. If nothing else can be arranged, Freedom will have to temporarily lease the addresses it needs.
A huge, degraded internet
According to an analysis by Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist at APNIC (RIR for the Asia-Pacific region), we've been forced to make a fundamental concession to prevent the present IPv4-based internet grinding to a halt. Whereas the original Internet Protocol made no distinction between connected systems, and each host was reachable via a unique IP address, we now have a degraded internet that largely supports only client-server connections. And a client within a (CG)NAT structure is unreachable for the outside world.
As a result, applications that depend on peer-to-peer connections no longer work – not properly, at least. That goes for multi-player games, VoIP/WebRTC calling and distributed network applications such as BitTorrent, cryptocurrency networks and Tor, for example. And it isn't practical for users to host their own services, including websites or Nextcloud servers. The payback for those sacrifices is a network that supports upward of twenty billion connected devices, even though there are only about two billion active IPv4 addresses.
Reduced efficiency
When IPv4 address block transfers were enabled, the idea was to create a market that would deliver scarce IPv4 addresses to the places where they had the highest economic value. At the same time, the measure was designed to ensure that RIPE NCC retained an overview of who held which addresses. However, according to Huston, the number of unused (or perhaps one should say unadvertised and therefore unrouted) IPv4 addresses has in fact risen over the last two years. Indeed, the figure has gone up both in absolute terms and relative to the total number of assigned IPv4 addresses, implying less efficient use of the IPv4 address space.
What's more, transferred IPv4 address blocks have apparently been subdivided into an average of nine smaller blocks. That obviously has implications for routing table sizes. Huston believes that the reason why subdivision has nevertheless not been problematic is that the number of new (smaller) blocks created since 2012 accounts for less than 10 per cent of the total number of issued blocks.
In terms of the number of assigned IPv4 addresses per capita (per head of the population), the Netherlands is fourth in the global ranking (excluding certain island states and the Vatican). We have 2.9 addresses per capita, a figure exceeded only by the United States, Sweden and Norway.
Although the Netherlands has much more operational internet infrastructure than other European countries, IPv4 addresses are also shared on the web server side using SNI.
Peak IPv4
One might expect the increasing shortage of IPv4 addresses to accelerate the adoption of IPv6. However, RIPE NCC is worried about the possibility of other scenarios playing out. One possibility that concerns Huston is that the current internet could degrade from an asymmetrical system to a system fragmented by further subdivision of the IPv4 address space. Nevertheless, he hopes that the rise of IPv6-only hosts will drive further adoption of the modern protocol.
For a few years, at least, RIPE NCC sees IPv4 address prices continuing to rise. However, if IPv6 does make progress, there will ultimately be a turning point, when IPv4 addresses start to gradually lose their value: peak IPv4. According to Buckridge, it's currently still cheaper to buy IPv4 addresses than to superimpose an IPv6 network on an existing legacy infrastructure
Sustainable growt
For consumers who use the internet only for web browsing, e-mail, social media and video, IPv6 has no added value. For the operators of large corporate environments, however, IPv6 adoption has major benefits. And the shortage of public IPv4 addresses is not the only driver: some are also encountering issues within their private 10.0.0.0/8 address space, with its 16 million-plus possible addresses. Not only is that space too small for the biggest internet and telecom corporations, [1, 2] but serious network integration problems can arise following mergers and takeovers.
RIPE NCC's Technical Advisor Marco Hogewoning sees IPv6 as the only option for sustainable growth. The main reason being that it facilitates access for new market players and reduces the developed world's inbuilt advantage over developing countries. According to Hogewoning, there are serious risks associated with treating IPv4 as an asset. He wants to see the world urgently diminish its dependency on the old protocol. New technology rollouts represent ideal opportunities for IPv6 implementation, he believes. 5G and the IoT therefore have the potential to become decisive drivers for the adoption of IPv6.
