How this site decides what it will say.

Who publishes this

Network Lookup is an independent one-person project. Pages are published under the byline “Network Lookup Team,” which is the name of the publication, not a claim about how many people work on it — About says the same thing in plain words. One person is accountable for everything on this site, including the mistakes.

There are no guest contributors, no sponsored posts, and no syndicated content. Nothing here is published on anyone else's behalf.

Where the facts come from

Reference pages are written from the record that actually governs the thing being described, not from other websites that describe it:

• Autonomous systems — the RDAP and WHOIS records held by the regional registry that issued the number (ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, AFRINIC), plus live routing data for the prefixes the network announces.
• MAC address prefixes — the IEEE Registration Authority's published assignment files.
• Ports — the IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry, and the RFCs it cites.
• Certificates and DNS — Certificate Transparency logs and live DNS queries, read at the time you run the tool.

Where a page relies on a vendor's own documentation, it says so. Where a claim comes from a third-party database rather than the issuing registry, that distinction is stated rather than smoothed over, because the two are not the same kind of fact.

How claims are checked

Every researched entry is verified against the canonical source a second time, independently of whatever was written the first time. The check is against the registry, never against the draft's own citations — a citation that looks right is not evidence that the value is right.

Two rules do most of the work. A date is only published if the authoritative record actually carries one; several registries publish no assignment dates at all, and a date invented to fill that gap is treated as a defect rather than a detail. And a registrant is only attributed a block that the registry assigns to them — some address blocks are held centrally and sub-allocated to many unrelated companies, so attributing the whole block to one of them would be wrong even though it reads plausibly.

When something cannot be verified

The page says so. An honest “not published by the registry” or “no independent record found” is treated as a correct answer, not a gap to be filled. A confidently wrong statement about who operates a network is worse than an acknowledged unknown, because the wrong answer is the one people act on.

This is why some pages are shorter than others, and why a page will sometimes decline to characterise a company at all.

What is deliberately not published

• Personal contact details. Registry records often carry a named individual's phone number, email, or home-shaped address. Organisation names, role mailboxes, and registry handles are the record and stay; a way to contact a private individual does not, regardless of it being technically public.
• Invented figures. No estimated counts, no rounded-up statistics, no numbers that cannot be traced to a source.
• Data under licences that forbid it. This site carries advertising, so data sources whose free tiers prohibit commercial use are not used here, even where they would improve a page. Two were removed for exactly that reason.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, please say so — contact us with the page and what the correct record shows. Reports that identify a specific registry record are the fastest to act on, because they can be checked directly.

Corrections are made to the page itself rather than appended as a note, and a page that turns out to rest on a bad source is withdrawn rather than left up with a caveat.

Independence

The site is funded by advertising. Advertisers have no input into what is published, no advance sight of it, and no ability to have a page changed or removed. No page on this site is written to favour a product, and no tool reports a result other than what it measured.