RDAP
termnetworkinggovernance & risk
Stands for: Registration Data Access Protocol
The structured, authenticated successor to WHOIS: the same registration data, returned as JSON over HTTPS, with differentiated access instead of one public answer for everyone.
It exists because WHOIS could not survive privacy law. A single unauthenticated text response cannot show a registrar's staff one thing and an anonymous querier another, so the whole record had to be redacted for everybody. RDAP can distinguish the caller, which is what makes tiered access possible at all. Adoption has been slow for the ordinary reason: the old protocol still answers, and nothing breaks by ignoring the new one.
Also known as: Registration Data Access Protocol