The RDAP Initiative

In 2010, the internet infrastructure community began to hold discussions about the need for the technical evolution of the Whois service due to a lack of:

• Standardized command structures
• Standardized output and error structures
• Support for internationalization and localization
• Support for user identification, authentication, and access control

In the years following, members of the technical and policy communities worked diligently to explore alternatives to address these limitations. As a result of this work, a successor protocol known as the Registration Data Access Protocol, or RDAP, was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF's) Whois-based Extensible Internet Registration Data Service (WEIRDS) Working Group. The WEIRDS Working Group developed specifications for RDAP that were published as Request For Comment (RFC) documents 7480, 7481, 9082, 9083, and 9224.

The RDAP documents are currently maintained by the IETF Registration Protocols Extensions (REGEXT) Working Group.

The RDAP Experiment

Verisign developed pilot implementations of RDAP and has been actively involved with IETF and ICANN efforts to support standardization and adoption.

The RDAP pilot for .com and .net is complete. Verisign deployed a production-quality RDAP service in August 2019. Information describing the service can be found on the Registry Data Access Protocol Help page.

Update

In January 2025, ICANN announced that RDAP “will be the definitive source of delivering generic top-level domain name registration in place of sunsetted Whois services.” Verisign continues to support RDAP, and ICANN’s updated registration data policies, while also providing Whois services, where appropriate.