Hi Benoît,
the whois-service is a hierarchical service like DNS. It starts at IANA and IANA delegates responsibility for ccTLDs towards the country's NIC.
In respect to this, the 'official' entry point for .ch queries is the whois service on whois.nic.ch.
Switch itself is only the reseller for .ch domains, therefor the switch.ch whois service redirects everything switch.ch is not responsible for to the ccTLD's whois service what is whois.nic.ch. see ==> https://www.iana.org/whois?q=imp.ch
I'm aware that switch.ch and nic.ch are often considered to be like the same because a while ago, switch.ch has been the only registration service to register domains within the .ch ccTLD.
Today, the resellers of ccTLD domains need to have a valid contract with the authority where a specific ccTLD has been assigned to by IANA to register a ccTLD domain. Depending on the contract, smaller resellers tend to use the ccTLD's 'official' whois service where bigger resellers run their own whois servers and the ccTLD's authoritative whois service delegates there.
Because it became a common misbehavior to collect (privacy sensitive) information by abusing whois to collect data for datamining, a lot of whois services restrict the number of queries coming from 'unidentified' clients to some few queries within a time frame - or, if the specific whois server is not authoritative for answering the query, does not answer at all but redirects to IANA's whois and from there to the ccTLDs whois service (what might then point you to the registrars whois service).
Switch is likely answering your query on IPv4 for legacy reasons because the IPv4 address your query originates from is known as privileged from the time Switch has been the official authoritative registry for .ch and also IPv4 address space.
Your IPv6 address seem to be not considered to be 'privileged' and you are redirected to whois.nic.ch.
Compare it to 'recursion' in DNS - some IPs are allowed for recursion and for all else, queries for DNS names where the DNS server that is queried is not authoritative, you'll get thrown back to the root servers.
imp.ch is not registered with Switch, but inic.ch and whois.switch.ch is not authoritative to answer the query. whois.switch.ch answers 'on behalf' (like DNS recursion) for your IPv4 address, but not for the IPv6 address since the IPv6 address was assigned to you after authority for .ch ccTLD was moved to nic.ch and your IPv6 address is not on Switch's privileged list to allow recursion ;-)
kind regards
Ralph ----- Am 17. Okt 2022 um 15:43 schrieb Benoit Panizzon benoit.panizzon@imp.ch:
Weird, switch only seems to support legacy ip.
whois.nic.ch has address 130.59.31.241 whois.nic.ch has IPv6 address 2001:620:0:ff::b
$ whois -h 130.59.31.241 imp.ch This information is subject to an Acceptable Use Policy. See https://www.nic.ch/terms/aup/
Domain name: imp.ch [...]
$ whois -h 2001:620:0:ff::b imp.ch Requests of this client are not permitted. Please use https://www.nic.ch/whois/ for queries.
Mit freundlichen Grüssen
-Benoît Panizzon-
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