After long fight, Donuts adds .charity to its gTLD stable
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, Donuts has prevailed in the two-horse race for the .charity gTLD.
The company appears to have privately resolved its contention set, paying off rival bidder Famous Four Media, judging by updates to ICANN’s web site today.
The gTLD had been scheduled for an ICANN “last resort” auction in April, but that’s now off.
Famous Four has also withdrawn its application, leaving Donuts the only remaining applicant.
I believe it will be Donuts’ 239th 240th gTLD.
But for a while it looked like Famous Four had a slam-dunk on its hands.
Back in 2014, the Independent Objector of the new gTLD program had filed an Community Objection against Donuts’ application, saying it was too risky to unleash a .charity domain onto the world without registration eligibility restrictions.
The fear was (and probably still is) that fraudsters could use the domains to lend an air of credibility to their online scams.
The IO prevailed, pretty much gifting Famous Four — which had proposed restrictions — the TLD.
But Donuts embarked upon an arduous set of appeals, including an Independent Review Process case, that culminated, last December, in a ruling (pdf) that reversed the original Community Objection decision.
That cleared the way for Donuts back into the application process and, now, the private auction it seems to have won.
Due to ICANN’s adoption of Governmental Advisory Committee advice on sensitive strings, Donuts will be obliged to put some Public Interest Commitments into its .charity contract, with the aim of reducing abuse.
Recent Comments
"Company well-known for abuse of personal data has insatiable appetite for personal data" - what a surprise.... read more
If 7 figures for MMX includes a decimal point you may be accurate. At this point with the success of new TLDs , could ... read more
SO what you are saying is most don't defend, but when they do its expensive and they win. So in most cases the ones that... read more
It is still in their Universal Terms of Service: "GoDaddy also reserves the right to charge you reasonable “administr... read more
In point of fact, several registrars charge their customers an administrative fee for handling UDRP disputes. -----... read more
The idea of having respondents pay $500 has a couple of flaws. First, in many of these dead-on cases the respondent n... read more
Respondents also incur an economic cost when due to a UDRP process with multiple layers of bias in favor of TM interests... read more
"Registrants, on the other hand, pay only for their own defence, if any." Mr. Wood ignores the fact that domain regis... read more
The key factor in the decision was a "Teflon survey" demonstrating that 75% of consumers associated booking.com with a p... read more
Page, see a separate comment below where I basically expanded on your statement, and presented an example where such a d... read more