GAC gives reprieve to four at-risk new gTLD bids

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has given four new gTLD applicants cause to breath a sigh of relief with its official advice following last week’s meeting in Toronto.

The last-minute reprieve comes in the form of a list of specially protected strings matching the names of intergovernmental organizations that is much shorter than previously demanded.

Led by a US proposal, the GAC has told ICANN to protect the name of any IGO that qualifies for a .int domain name.

As .int is the smallest, most restricted gTLD out there, it only has about 166 registrations currently. More IGOs are believed to qualify for the names but have not claimed them.

If ICANN eventually implements the GAC advice — which seems likely — these 166-plus strings could be placed on a second-level reserved list that all new gTLD registries would have to honor.

While some may object to such a move, it’s a much shorter list than requested by the United Nations and other agencies earlier this year.

In July, the UN and 38 other IGOs said that any name found on the so-called “6ter” list of Paris Convention organizations maintained by WIPO should be protected — over 1,100 strings in total.

The UN had also asked for protection at both top and second levels immediately, which would have killed off four paid-up applications.

Corporate Executive Board Company (.ceb), Platinum Registry Limited (.fit) Top Level Domain Holdings (.fit) and Dot Latin (.uno), all have applications for strings on the 6ter list.

Crucially, the Toronto GAC advice only asks for the names to be protected at the top level from the second round of new gTLD applications.

The Toronto communique states:

in the public interest, implementation of such protection at the second level must be accomplished prior to the delegation of any new gTLDs, and in future rounds of gTLDs, at the second and top level.

This means that applications for strings on the .int list are probably safe.

We ran a recent .int zone file against the DI PRO database of new gTLD applications and found three applications that would have been affected by a first-round prohibition on .int strings.

The two applications for .gdn (Guardian Media and Navigation Information Systems) and the one for .iwc (Richemont DNS) appear to be safe under the rules proposed by the GAC.

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Tagged: gac, icann 45, igos, reserved names, toronto