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.