Dear Councillors

 

Following the AOB item regarding a potential issue for referral to the SPIRT presented by Sam Demetriou on last week’s Council call, Councillors are asked to seek the input from their SG and Cs now, so that we can be in a position to vote on whether to refer this to the SPIRT during our June meeting, in order that the SPIRT can assess the issue and discuss it with Org. 

 

As a reminder, the issue is as follows:

In the draft version of the base registry agreement for the Next Round applicants there was a requirement that all registry operators would only use extensible provisioning protocol (EPP) extensions that are registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). IANA maintains a register of EPP extensions, and there is a very specific process involving the IETF where proposed new EPP extensions can be approved for inclusion in this IANA register. In certain cases, gTLD registries have historically used EPP extensions that are not included in that database, and so when reviewing the draft base RA requirements the RySG flagged this as a problem. As a result of this, ICANN agreed to remove the requirement from the Next Round base RA.

 

Despite the removal of this requirement from the base RA, there remain some requirements under the technical questions and the registry system testing that back-end registry service providers (RSPs) have to go through that pertain to this requirement. So, there are some technical questions to evaluate RSPs that require the applicants to attest that they will only use the EPP extensions that are registered in the IANA registry. That requirement is also tested during the registry system testing. There is therefore a misalignment between what's tested-for and what's required to be attested-to during registry system testing, and what's actually required under the registry agreement.

 

The RySG has therefore brought this issue to Council, with a view to Council requesting that SPIRT and ICANN org consider how to address this misalignment, for example by making optional the attestation that RSPs will not use EPP extensions that are not in the IANA registry.  This would require a revision to the Registry Service Provider Handbook that lists out the registry questions that have to be evaluated, as well as the registry system testing that tests against this criteria. Potentially this would also need to apply to those RSPs that have already completed the testing, so that they should not be held to a standard that has been removed from the base RA.

 

Many thanks.