Note that it is being replaced with a different protocol, is there any indication that there are less stringent requirements on identity data disclosure on the new proto?
It's the same data. What's different is essentially the transport layer for the information.
> Two protocols that have the same data would be quite redundant.
When one is plaintext, underspecified, and decades old, they're not. I don't think you realize how primitive WHOIS is; this is the entirety of its RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3912 Note how it doesn't go any farther than "it's a plain text blob retrieved over TCP". Now contrast with the RDAP RFCs, which fully specify every aspect of how an RDAP service works:
Integrating with WHOIS is a nightmare, as every registrar/registry does it differently since there's no common specification other than "connect over TCP". RDAP is fully specified, so you can simply use a language-specific library and then inspect a strongly typed response object returned by said library to get specific information out of the response. It's a night-and-day difference, and there's obviously a reason for the new spec to exist even though it conveys the same data. It's absolutely not redundant.
