TL;DR

RDAP is the new WHOIS.

So… the WHOIS protocol is kind of a joke and its too free form basically led to a situation that is not easily addressed with code.

As a result, the RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) was designed to supersede it with something that is modern and structured.

The structure comes from two things:

• using JSON syntax;
• sticking to a specific structure in the JSON.

The modern comes from the adoption of the HTTP REST model.

This will hopefully make API-level consumption of data easier. Nowadays, almost all API-level endpoints are ad-hoc services that provide some form of pre-parsed data, usually at a cost (although sometimes with a free tier). Moving to RDAP helps define a standard response and stimulate registries to provide data in a code-friendly way out of the box.

Let’s cross fingers and… stay safe!