The Whois protocol is officially history now. After January 28, 2025, the day ICANN officially completed its transition to Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), further use of Whois is entirely voluntary, meaning no sanctions will apply for discontinuing the service.
Whois has been finally replaced by RDAP, although, as Domain Incite noted in its report, many registries and registrars will probably offer RDAP and Whois in parallel for some time. It is also possible that many people involved in the domain business will continue to use the term ‘Whois’ to refer to RDAP by force of habit, so ingrained it is in the industry’s DNA.
In any case, the data delivered by RDAP is largely the same as Whois data. Users who access the service via a web interface, such as lookup.icann.org on ICANN’s website, are unlikely to notice any difference at all. On the other hand, those who use custom software to access Whois via port 43 might have a problem and will need to tweak their system’s settings to make it correctly display incoming RDAP responses.
Most importantly, registrant personal data, which is currently redacted in Whois, will not show up in RDAP responses either, as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy laws apply equally to it. The only way to access private data is to request it from the respective registrar directly or through ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service, and pray that the registrar finds your request sufficiently justified.
