What is a "Whois Limit Exceeded" error message?

Whois services are routinely subject to abusive practices, such as data mining. Afilias has an active monitoring program in place, and we plan to increase our protective measures against data mining on the public Whois service on Port 43 and on the web. Afilias takes certain preemptive actions to restrict or ban abnormally high or abusive usage of the public Whois service. Any party affected by these measures will receive an appropriate system message providing a notice of anti-abuse deployment. Accredited .INFO registrars also have access to domain, host and contact information via EPP using their authorized credentials.