In article <BLUPR05MB5954ABC8A12AB055084A8EDB4920@BLUPR05MB595.namprd05.prod.outlook.com> you write:

Has there been an discussion about replacing EPP with something more modern?

No. That was easy. The spec has been updated a few times, most recently by RFC 5730 and 5734 in 2009 but it hasn't changed much. There is an active eppext working group in the IETF that spends most of its time documenting and cleaning up EPP extensions that regstries and registrars have been using all along but never got around to writing up clearly. A new protocol called RDAP is intended to replace WHOIS. It's pretty modern, blobs of JSON over http. You can read all about it in RFC 7480 through 7484. Some people want to use RDAP to check whether a domain is available, but there's been a lot of pushback and advice to use EPP, that's what it's for. R's, John