WHOIS Is Broken in 2026. Here's the RDAP-First Drop-In That Actually Returns JSON

WHOIS has been quietly dying for a decade, and most teams only noticed in the last eighteen months. If you ran a domain-intelligence pipeline between 2015 and 2022, the story went like this. You shelled out to the whois binary, or hit a free public wrapper, or paid WhoisXML API $0.00099 per lookup.