Where is Whois going?

Within the industry, it is widely agreed that the current port-43-based Whois was never intended to function at the scale the internet has achieved today, that it is fundamentally flawed and that, in light of various stakeholders, which include law enforcement, intellectual property owners, network operations, and end users, there needs to be a comprehensive revision, if not a complete rebuild.

The effort to reform or redesign Whois has played out in fits and starts for years, if not decades (I have a faint recollection of serving on a task force that was trying to address this back in 2003 or so).

As I write this, the most appropriate description of the Whois reform process is "stalled." There was a public comment period in 2015 about the possibility of eliminating Whois Privacy, which elicited a strong backlash.

That said, there is a successor protocol, RDAP, designated by ICANN, that was supposed to come into effect in 2017, but, at the time of writing (mid-2018), we're not there yet.