RPP, a future protocol for creating and managing domain names?

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2025-01-07 20:00:04

Most of the major domain name registries currently receive requests to create or change these domain names through the EPP, i.e. Extensible Provisioning Protocol. Registrars use this protocol to communicate with the registry . However, plans are afoot to replace EPP with RPP (RESTful Provisioning Protocol). Since these plans are in a very early stage, there’s still time to let your opinion be known.

The EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) works well and is currently widely used by a large number of domain name registries1. Those under contract with ICANN are actually obliged to provide an EPP interface. EPP was standardised by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in 2004 and the current standard comprises several documents, the main one being RFC 5730. More than twenty years have passed since it was standardised. Do we want to continue using EPP?

A word in passing. In the world of online access to services, there is often talk of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). In the context of this article, there is not really any difference between a protocol and an API, although in a broader context, API is normally used only for certain types of protocol2. Note that the registrars have access to an API for their operations with Afnic.