It seems like you really don't know how whois works at all. Whois is a protocol, anyone with an internet connection can connect to whois servers and retrieve whois information. Whois servers themselves are run by domain registrars; the backbone DNS/whois servers, run by internic and other various organizations, contain information on each domain, as well as what registrar registered it it and the authoritative whois server for it. When you do a whois lookup you query these main whois servers (usually rs.internic.net), to find out the authoritative whois server for that domain. Then your whois client would connect to that server and get the whois information. Whois "providers", as you call them, just have scripts to do this automatically. Becoming a "provider" will server you no benefit at all because any information about the domain's registrant is already publicly available to everybody.