WHOIS HAS BEEN REPLACED BY RDAP: HOW DO THE TWO SYSTEMS COMPARE?

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

ICANN officially abandoned the WHOIS service on January 28. To replace it, ICANN released the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) to provide users with access to gTLD registration data. RDAP has numerous advantages over WHOIS including support for access controls on the data that a user can see, JSON support, and HTTPS support.