ICANN | Proposed .AERO Sponsorship Agreement Posted for Public Comment

The proposed .AERO Sponsorship Agreement is posted for public comment and can be viewed here [PDF, 56K] and appendices here [PDF, 748K]. The current agreement was due to expire on 17 December 2006 and was renewed a number of times, similarly to the other proof-of-concept sTLDs, to permit adequate time to satisfactorily conclude the renewal negotiation.

Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques (SITA SC) has requested transition of the sponsorship agreement from SITA SC to SITA Information Networking Computing USA, Inc. (SITA INC USA), a Delaware corporation. SITA INC USA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SITA NV and would be a successor to the rights and obligations of SITA SC under the prior sponsorship agreement for the .AERO top-level domain (the "TLD"). The contracting officer for SITA stated that, "Eligibility verification will be performed in an unchanged form and Dot Aero Council will continue advising SITA INC USA on policy development." ICANN’s Office of the General Counsel reviewed the request and supporting corporate documentation and found it to be acceptable.

The proposed .AERO sponsorship agreement substantially follows the format of other recent sTLD registry agreements negotiated by ICANN. The agreement is for a ten-year term, and provides for the same set of requirements for:

compliance with consensus and temporary policies except to the extent policy development has been delegated to the sponsoring organization;
comprehensive registry data escrow;
approval of new registry services and modifications to existing registry services; and,
fees to ICANN would be based on the total number of registrations.

The following summarizes changes in the proposed .AERO sponsorship agreement from its original agreement (http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/agreements/aero/ ) authorized on 17 December 2001:

Attachment 13 of the current agreement allows the Sponsor to register directly with the Registry Operator up to 1,000 domain names for its own use and provides a list of these names at the time the agreement was approved. The language with this provision now may be found in Appendix 6, Part F, and no longer requires the list of names to be provided.

Comments on the proposed agreement can be posted to aero-renewal-2008@icann.org through 19 January 2009, and viewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/aero-renewal-2008.