SITA has signed a new 10-year sponsorship agreement with ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The original agreement, signed in December 2001, had been due to expire in December 2006 but had been extended by ICANN (as was the case with other proof-of-concept sTLDs), to allow time for the conclusion of renewal negotiations.

Under the fresh agreement, SITA will remain the sponsor for the .aero top-level domain. Eligibility verification will be performed in an unchanged form and the Dot Aero Council will continue to advise SITA on policy developments. ICANN's Office of the General Counsel reviewed the request and supporting corporate documentation and found it to be acceptable.

As noted on ICANN's public website www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-19dec08-en.htm, the proposed .aero sponsorship agreement substantially follows the format of other recent sTLD registry agreements negotiated by ICANN. It provides 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 based on the total number of registrations.

The detailed text of the agreement, including a summary of changes confirmed against the original 2001 agreement, can be found at www.icann.org/en/tlds/agreements/aero/

*NOTE: "As a private-public partnership, ICANN is dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the Internet; to promoting competition; to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and to developing policy appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes. ICANN, a public benefit, non-profit entity, is the international organization responsible for the management and oversight of the coordination of the Internets domain name system and its unique identifiers." www.icann.org