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The internet is about to get a lot gayer

Kevin Murphy, February 20, 2019, 10:38:44 (UTC), Domain Registries

Seven years after four companies applied for the .gay top-level domain, we finally have a winner.
Three applicants, including the community-driven bid that has been fighting ICANN for exclusive recognition for years, this week withdrew their applications, leaving Top Level Design the prevailing bidder.
Top Level Design is the Portland, Oregon registry that already runs .ink, .design and .wiki.
The withdrawing applicants are fellow portfolio registries Donuts and MMX, and community applicant dotgay LLC, which had been the main holdout preventing the contention set being resolved.
I do not yet know how the settlement was reached, but it smells very much like a private auction.
As a contention set only goes to auction with consent of all the applicants, it seems rather like it came about after dotgay finally threw in the towel.
dotgay was the only applicant to apply as a formal “community”, a special class of applicant under ICANN rules that gives a no-auction path to delegation if a rigorous set of tests can be surmounted.
Under dotgay’s plan, registrants would have to have been verified gay or gay-friendly before they could register a .gay domain, which never sat right with me.
The other applicants, Top Level Design included, all proposed open, unrestricted TLDs.
dotgay, which had huge amounts of support from gay rights groups, failed its Community Priority Evaluation in late 2014. The panel of Economist Intelligence Unit experts awarded it 10 out the 16 available points, short of the 14-point prevailing threshold.
Basically, the EIU said dotgay’s applicant wasn’t gay enough, largely because its definition of “gay” was considered overly broad, comprising the entire LGBTQIA+ community, including non-gay people.
After dotgay appealed, ICANN a few months later overturned the CPE ruling on a technicality.
A rerun of the CPE in October 2015 led to dotgay’s bid being awarded exactly the same failing score as a year earlier, leading to more dotgay appeals.
The .gay set was also held up by an ICANN investigation into the fairness of the CPE process as carried out by the EIU, which unsurprisingly found that everything was just hunky-dory.
The company in 2016 tried crowdfunding to raise $360,000 to fund its appeal, but after a few weeks had raised little more than a hundred bucks.
Since October 2017, dotgay has been in ICANN’s Cooperative Engagement Process, a form of negotiation designed to avert a formal, expensive, Independent Review Process appeal, and the contention set had been on hold.
The company evidently decided it made more sense to cut its losses by submitting to an auction it had little chance of winning, rather than spend six or seven figures on a lengthy IRP in which it had no guarantee of prevailing.
Top Level Design, in its application, says it wants to create “the most safe, secure, and prideful .gay TLD possible” and that it is largely targeting “gay and queer people as well as those individuals that are involved in supporting gay cultures, such as advocacy, outreach, and civil rights.”
But, let’s face it, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of porn in there too.
There’s no mention in the winning bid of any specific policies to counter the abuse, such as cyberbullying or overt homophobia, that .gay is very likely to attract.
Top Level Design is likely to take .gay to launch in the back end of the year.
The settlement of the contention set is also good news for two publicly traded London companies.
MMX presumably stands to get a one-off revenue boost (I’m guessing in seven figures) from losing another auction, while CentralNic, Top Level Design’s chosen back-end registry provider, will see the benefits on an ongoing basis.

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Comments (2)

  1. Tripeee says:
    February 20, 2019 at 3:12 pm

    If 7 figures for MMX includes a decimal point you may be accurate.
    At this point with the success of new TLDs , could not a see a multi-million dollar payoff for .gay

    Reply
    • Kevin Murphy says:
      February 20, 2019 at 3:44 pm

      There’s a lot of potential for premium sales into the porn market, which bumps up the value of this TLD, imho. Remember, gay.xxx sold for $500k.

      Reply

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