Subject: WG Review: Extensible Provisioning Protocol Extensions (eppext)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 09:18:08 -0800

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area. The
IESG has not made any determination yet. The following draft charter was
submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send
your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by 2013-12-02.

Extensible Provisioning Protocol Extensions (eppext)
------------------------------------------------
Current Status: Proposed WG

Assigned Area Director:
  Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>

Charter:

The Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) was a work product of the IETF
Provisioning Registry Protocol (provreg) working group. EPP was published
as a Proposed Standard (RFCs 3730, 3731, 3732, 3733, and 3734) in March
2004. It became a Draft Standard (RFCs 4930, 4931, 4932, 4933, and 4934)
in May 2007, and a Standard (Standard 69; RFCs 5730, 5731, 5732, 5733,
and 5734) in August 2009. It is the standard domain name provisioning
protocol for generic top-level domain name registries that operate under
the auspices of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN). It is also used by a number of country code top-level domain
registries.

Domain name registries implement a variety of business models. The
difference in these models made it very difficult to come up with a "one
size fits all" provisioning protocol, so the provreg working group made a
conscious decision to focus on a minimal set of common functionality. EPP
was designed to be extensible to allow additional features to be
specified on an "as needed" basis. Guidelines for extending EPP were
published as Informational RFC 3735 in March 2004.

The provreg working group was chartered to develop EPP, but not these
additional extensions. The working group was closed in 2004 after
producing a number of Proposed Standard specifications. As registries
began to implement and deploy EPP the need for extensions became real,
and the user community found itself facing a situation in which multiple
extensions were being developed by different registries to solve the same
basic problems, such as registering additional contact information.

EPP is widely implemented by generic top-level domain name registry
operators. It is also used by multiple country-code top-level domain name
registry operators. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) has an active program to delegate a large number of new
generic top-level domains. EPP will be used to provision those domains,
and new registry operators are expected to develop additional protocol
extensions. With no way to coordinate the development of these
extensions, the problem of non-standard extension duplication by multiple
operators is only expected to become worse.

The goal of the EPP Extensions (eppext) working group is to create an
IANA registry of EPP extensions and to review specifications of
extensions for inclusion in the registry. It will accomplish this goal in
two steps:

1. Develop a specification for a registry of and corresponding
registration procedures for EPP extensions. One proposal is documented in
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hollenbeck-epp-ext-reg/.

2. Produce a small number of extensions based on existing Internet Draft
documents and use the IANA registration process as developed in 1 to
register those extensions, as follows:

DNSSEC key relay: draft-gieben-epp-keyrelay
(http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-gieben-epp-keyrelay/)

Internationalized domain names: draft-obispo-epp-idn
(http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-obispo-epp-idn/)

New TLD launch phases: draft-tan-epp-launchphase
(http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-tan-epp-launchphase/)

Trademark Clearinghouse: draft-lozano-tmch-smd
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lozano-tmch-smd/)

Note: draft-tan-epp-launchphase has a normative dependency on
draft-lozano-tmch-smd.

Only the development of the registration process and the
publication/registration of the four extensions noted above are in scope
for the working group. The working group can choose not to publish or
register one or more of the extensions noted above, but it is out of
scope to work on other extensions.

Milestones:
  May 2014 - Extensions registry document to IESG  
  Jul 2014 - DNSSEC key relay extension to IESG
  Jul 2014 - New TLD launch phases extension to IESG
  Sep 2014 - Internationalized domain names extension to IESG