Re: [gnso-vi-feb10] SRSU

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roberto,

The work reports of Working Group C are on-line and I'm not the only 
participant now a member of the VI PDP WG.
The original contracts of each of .aero, .coop and .museum are also 
on-line. Here is one sponsorship attachment, .coop's, from November 
2001: 
http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/agreements/coop/sponsorship-agmt-att1-05nov01.htm
The reason that each sought, and obtained, an exception, was that due 
to the stop/go/stop/go nature of the contract negotiations, they 
lacked EPP implementations when they were finally contracted.
In the case of .coop, the delegation was made on 2002-01-30, SLD 
delegations resolved as of that date. Not until 2002-10-01 was the 
registry prepared to accept an EPP connection from a registrar.
At Montevideo Cary and I persuaded Louis to a numeric exception, which 
lasted a whole day before being significantly reduced, yet it still 
existed. There was about a year of chicken played between Louis and 
Cary subsequently, but there really was no capability, by two of the 
three sTLD operators, to accommodate registrars ab initio.
For those who missed the dirt, the situation for the gTLDs wasn't a 
lot better. The common trusted implementer decided surprise was a big 
win and the surprised trustees had to run to catch up, and had delayed 
launches several months after the first gTLD had an EPP server ready 
to support registrars. Again, I'm not the only party to that knowledge 
now a member of the VI PDP WG.
In sum, the sponored model existed from the point of the Working Group 
C's October 23, 1999, Interim Report and has never subsequently been 
absent from the set of registry models. EPP readiness gated gTLD 
launches, and exceptions existed for the sTLD launches (and back then 
we didn't call all non-iso3166 registries gTLDs).
And here's a tasty tidbit from the vault: 
http://www.dnso.org/wgroups/wg-c/Arc01/msg00023.html
Eric