ICANN Signs Affirmations of Intent with CNNIC, Neustar and Nominet for EBERO Services

On 8 April, ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehadé signed affirmations of intent with China Internet Network Information Center, Neustar, Inc., and Nominet for the provision of emergency back-end registry operation, or EBERO, services for new gTLDs.

This is an important milestone for ICANN in the implementation of the New gTLD Program as these entities will help to guarantee that domain names within a new gTLD continue to resolve in the event of a failure by a new TLD operator.

ICANN’s Karla Valente said: “While we do not anticipate that any of the new registries will fail in the future, we knew it was important to take steps to mitigate the risk of how a failure could impact the stability and security of the DNS.  We did this in two phases. First, we created a robust evaluation process to help ensure new registries are operationally, financially and technically sound. And second, ICANN has established the EBEROs to make sure that should anything happen, back-end registry operators stand ready to meet our obligation to provide continuity and maintain the stability of the DNS.

The three geographically diverse organizations – CNNIC, Neustar and Nominet – met stringent technical requirements and demonstrated years of experience in operating domain name services, registration data directory services and extensible provisioning protocol services. Our cross-functional evaluation team had a difficult job in selecting them, as 14 very capable companies from around the world responded to our Request for Information.

We are so pleased to have the participation of these three providers, whose geographic diversity is aligned with the diversity of the new gTLD applicants and future registries.”