Four action sports gTLDs fall off a cliff

Adrenaline TLD has confirmed that it no longer plans to apply to ICANN for the sport-themed top-level domains .surf, .skate, .bike and .board.
The news was implicit in the announcement from Starting Dot that it has partnered with Adrenaline for .ski earlier this week, but the company today confirmed as much.
In a statement this morning, Adrenaline’s Rob Rozicki said:

Although we are not filing applications for the remaining four TLD’s in this application window we will investigate bringing them to the market in the next round of applications. However if you are an applicant for any of our other TLD’s please contact us to see how we can work together to help the action sports community.

Rozicki is also working with Starting Dot’s marketing agency, the newly formed DomainDicition, as head of North American online marketing.
The .ski project can be found at dot-ski.com. Its Twitter handle is @dot_ski.

3 Comments Tagged: .ski, adrenaline tld, domaindiction, starting dot

Digital Archery lessons from tonight’s tweet-up

ICANN held a Twitter session tonight during which executives answered questions about the new gTLD program in that notoriously restrictive 140-character format.
Unsurprisingly, in light of the frustration borne out of ongoing delays, most of the questions were about timing.
New gTLD applicants wanted to know when ICANN plans to host its Big Reveal event, when the Digital Archery application batching system will open, and when the batches will be confirmed.
The only specific date applicants were given was May 29, which is when ICANN plans to publish its updated program timetable.

A15: Additional schedule details to be posted by 29 May. – @rodbeckstrom #newgTLD #ICANN #ICANNchat

— ICANN (@ICANN) May 22, 2012

But @ICANN gave away enough information to make a broad estimate about the date digital archery will commence.
First, ICANN confirmed that the Big Reveal will be before its public meeting in Prague kicks off on June 23.

A8: Update on timeline to be published shortly. Target reveal date still before Prague. – @rodbeckstrom #newgTLD #ICANN #ICANNchat

— ICANN (@ICANN) May 22, 2012

ICANN also said that the digital archery process will begin before the reveal day and finish after.

A1: Secondary timestamp (digarchery) scheduled 2 open b4 reveal day & close aftr. Designed for reliability & timeliness #ICANNchat #newgTLD

— ICANN (@ICANN) May 22, 2012

A6: #ICANN will publish batches after the reveal, after the digital archery process is complete. – @rodbeckstrom #ICANNchat #newgTLD

— ICANN (@ICANN) May 22, 2012

The archery window will be open for about three weeks, we learned.

A12: The secondary timestamp process will be open for approx 3 weeks, details later. – @rodbeckstrom #newgTLD #ICANN #ICANNchat

— ICANN (@ICANN) May 22, 2012

We can draw some broad conclusions from this information.
The latest possible date for the Big Reveal, given what ICANN said tonight, is June 22 (the Friday before Prague), so the latest possible date for the digital archery window opening is June 21.
In that case, digital archery would run June 21 – July 12, or thereabouts.
Because the archery can’t start before the applications are all submitted, the earliest window would be May 31 – June 20.
My estimates err towards the lower end. I think we’re looking at archery starting within a week of the application window closing and ending immediately before or during Prague.
If ICANN decides that it wants the archery out of the way before the meeting begins, the window could have to open as early as May 31.
If it wants the window to close post-Prague, we’re looking at it opening around June 11.

1 Comment Tagged: batching, digital archery, ICANN, new gTLDs, tas

Neustar hires Becky Burr as privacy chief

Neustar has recruited one of the ICANN community’s best-known lawyers as its new chief privacy officer.
Becky Burr is set to join the company June 1, reporting to general counsel Scott Blake Harris, according to a Neustar press release.
Burr is well-known in the domain name industry.
While at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration during the Clinton administration, she was one of the people most heavily involved in ICANN’s creation.
In private practice as a partner at the law firm Wilmer Hale since 2000, she’s been involved in many of the industry’s most fractious legal disputes.
Over just the last couple of years she’s represented the .Jobs Charter Compliance Coalition in its fight against Employ Media, ICM Registry in its quest to get .xxx approved, and most recently Big Room in its attempts to fend off a .eco trademark infringement lawsuit.
She’s also sat on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and its country-code Names Supporting Organization.

Comment Tagged: becky burr, neustar

Battle over .jobs to drag on into 2013

Employ Media’s fight to avoid losing its contract to run .jobs won’t be resolved this year, according to the latest batch of arbitration documents published by ICANN.
February 2013, two years after the the battle was joined, is now the absolute earliest the company could find out whether ICANN has the right to shut down .jobs due to an alleged contract breach.
As you may recall from deep in the mists of time (actually, February last year) ICANN threatened to terminate Employ Media’s contract due to the controversial .Jobs Universe project.
The registry gave thousands of .jobs domains, mostly geographic or vocational strings, to its partner, the DirectEmployers Association, which started competing against jobs listings sites.
A coalition of jobs sites including Monster.com complained about this on the basis that .jobs was originally designed for companies to list their own jobs, not to aggregate third-party listings.
The coalition believed that the .Jobs Universe project was essentially a fait accompli, despite Employ Media’s promise that all the names now allocated to DirectEmployers would be subject to an open RFP process.
ICANN eventually agreed with the coalition, issued a breach notice, and now it finds itself in arbitration under the auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce.
Employ Media demanded arbitration in May last year, but it has inexplicably taken until now for it, ICANN and the ICC to publish a draft timetable for the process.
A face-to-face hearing has now been scheduled for January 28 to February 8, 2013. Between now and December, it’s paper filings – claims and counterclaims – all the way.
Arbitration clauses were added as standard to ICANN’s registry agreements in order to create a cheaper, faster option than fighting out disagreements in the courts.
However, with both sides lawyered up and a process now likely to last at least two years, it’s easy to wonder just how much more efficient it will be.
It won’t be an easy decision for the ICC panel.
While I still believe Employ Media was a bit sneaky about how it won ICANN approval for the .Jobs Universe project – and it certainly disenfranchised other jobs sites – there’s no denying that .jobs is now a much healthier gTLD for registrants as a result of DirectEmployers’ involvement.
An ICANN win might actually be a bad thing.

1 Comment Tagged: .jobs, .jobs charter compliance coalition, arbitration, employ media, ICANN, icc

TAS reopens after humiliating 40 days

Forty days after it was taken offline for a bug fix, ICANN has reopened its TLD Application System, giving new gTLD applicants a week to finish off their applications.
TAS will now close May 30 at 2359 UTC, which is 1559 in California next Wednesday afternoon.
But applicants are being warned that waiting until the final day “may not provide sufficient time to complete all submission steps before the submission period closes.”
The date of the Big Reveal of applications, which I’m now expecting to come at some point before the Prague meeting at the end of June, is likely to be confirmed in the next day or so.
As well as fixing the bug – a data leakage vulnerability that enabled applicants to see each others’ file names, affecting over 150 users – ICANN has made system performance improvements and cleaned up its HTML preview function, in response to user complaints.
Repairing the vulnerability has cost ICANN “hundreds of thousands of dollars” since TAS was taken offline April 12, chief operating officer Akram Atallah estimated last Thursday.
The fact that the system has reopened half a day ahead of the most recently scheduled deadline – it was due to open at 1900 UTC tonight – is unlikely to win ICANN many plaudits.
If the opinions of the opinionated are any guide, the TAS outage has left ICANN with a severe dent in its already patchy reputation, even among fervent supporters.
Atallah and senior vice president Kurt Pritz came in for a pummeling during an ICANN summit attended by registrars and registries, many of them gTLD applicants, late last week.
Several outspoken long-time community members made it clear that their confidence in ICANN’s ability to hit deadlines is at an all-time low.
Expectations of professionalism have increased, as AusRegistry CEO Adrian Kinderis told Atallah, now that ICANN has $350 million of applicant cash in its bank account.
The bug itself may have been as unavoidable and understandable as any bug in new software, but ICANN’s tardiness resolving the problem has left applicant trust in many cases shattered.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, tas

Another contention battle confirmed as Starting Dot reveals five gTLD bids

Portfolio gTLD applicant Starting Dot is to apply to ICANN for five new generic top-level domains, catering mostly to vertical industries and professions.
The France-based company wants .archi, .bio, .design, .immo and .ski.
The first thing to note is that we now have another confirmed contention set – Starting Dot’s .immo application is not the same .immo announced by Nic.at a few weeks ago.
The word “immo” is apparently an abbreviation for “real estate” commonly used in Germany, France and Italy. The gTLD would be reserved for members of that sector.
The .archi gTLD would be reserved for certified architects. It’s backed by the International Architectural Union, a Paris-based umbrella trade group which represents over a million architects.
The .bio proposal, pitched at the food and agricultural industries, anticipates a semi-regulated namespace, while .design would be open to anyone with an interest in that topic.
For .ski, Starting Dot has partnered with Adrenaline TLD, which originally planned to file for five extreme sports gTLDs, on a joint-venture app.
As I blogged earlier today, Adrenaline founder Rob Rozicki now works for the new gTLD marketing firm DomainDiction, which seems to have signed Starting Dot as one of its first clients.

4 Comments Tagged: .archi, .bio, .design, .immo, .ski, domaindiction, ICANN, new gTLDs, starting dot

Three South African city gTLDs announced

UniForum, which runs South Africa’s .za country code, reportedly is applying to ICANN for three local city top-level domains.
The company, which also goes by the name of ZA Central Registry, is going for .capetown, .durban and .joburg (for Johannesburg), according to a report in MyBroadband.co.za.
That’s in addition to its controversial African Union-backed .africa bid.
ZACR is one of several ccTLD registries to get into the new gTLD game. In Europe, Nominet (.uk), Afnic (.fr and others), SIDN (.nl) and Nic.at have already announced applications.

Comment Tagged: .capetown, .durban, .joburg, .za, uniforum, za central registry, zacr

TLDH signs another city gTLD – .budapest

Top Level Domain Holdings has been backed by the city of Budapest as the official applicant for the .budapest generic top-level domain.
If the application is approved, TLDH subsidiary Minds + Machines will run the back-end registry and the city will receive a share of the revenue.
TLDH has previously announced deals with local governments for .london, .bayern (Bavaria), .miami and .nrw (North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state).
The company does not list its two announced Indian city gTLD bids – .mumbai (for which city approval may have been withdrawn) and .bangaluru (which appears to be a typo) — on its web site, but a spokesperson indicated that they’re both still active applications.
TLDH also seems to be confirming on its web site that it is in fact applying for .horse, an application I’d long suspected was nothing more than a red herring. Guess I was wrong.
Budapest is of course Hungary’s capital city. Wikipedia says it has about 1.74 million inhabitants, making it Europe’s seventh-largest city.

6 Comments Tagged: budapest, Minds + Machines, tldh

DomainDiction hires industry vets to market gTLDs

DomainDiction, a new marketing company set up to help new generic top-level domain registries, officially launches today.
The largely European company, headed by France-based CEO Jennie-Marie Larsen, says it is “the first marketing consultancy dedicated solely to Top Level Domains”.
Larsen started off her career in the domain name industry at NeuStar, and was most recently chief marketing officer at the new gTLD business management firm Sedari.
Fellow industry veteran Pinky Brand, who helped launch .mobi and was revealed last week to have left registry manager Afilias, is DomainDiction’s new chief strategy officer.
Larsen said in a press release:

DomainDiction´s expertise is multi-channel, international domain marketing. By utilizing a wide range of marketing tools, we are able to offer innovative strategies and outreach programs across each phase from sunrise, landrush, to renewals. We leverage our close registrar channel relationships, international PR, online marketing, and complex SEO & PPC strategies to ensure success for each TLD.

Also on the team: John Kirkham (formerly with HostEurope), Tina Lord (former CMO of EasySpace), Henry Lewington (Barracuda Digital) and Christoph Hausel (whose agency, Element C, has previously worked for Afilias and NeuStar).
Rob Rozicki, who a couple of years ago made a lot of noise about applying for five sports-based gTLDs (.skate, .ski, .board, etc) is on board as head of North American online marketing.
While DomainDiction is certainly the first pure-play new gTLD marketing outfit that I can think of, the company will face competition from traditional PR firms and other gTLD consultancies.
Architelos, which made over a million dollars consulting with new gTLD applicants over the application period, recently launched its own marketing service, Velocity.
DomainDiction is set to launch this afternoon.

1 Comment Tagged: architelos, domaindiction, ICANN, marketing, new gTLDs, sedari

Google Chrome handles new TLDs badly

Sint Maarten’s new .sx country-code top-level domain has been online for at least a couple months now, but Google’s Chrome browser appears to be still a bit wary of it.
Typing “registry.sx” and “nic.sx” into Chrome’s combined URL/search bar today, instead of being sent to my chosen destination I was instead sent to a page of Google search results.
The browser presented the message “Did you mean to go to http://registry.sx?”.

Once my intentions were confirmed, Chrome bounced me to the registry’s web site and seemed to remember my preference on future visits. Other Chrome users have reported the same behavior.
Chrome is understood to use the Public Suffix list to figure out what is and isn’t a domain, and .sx does not currently appear on that list.
Internet Explorer and Firefox (also a Public Suffix list user) both seem already to resolve .sx names normally.
While not a massive problem for .sx, which has just a handful of second-level domains active, new gTLD applicants might want to pay attention to this kind of thing.
Chrome has a significant share of the browser market – about 15% by some counts, as high as 38% by others.
Launching a new gTLD without full browser support could look messy. Chrome isn’t blocking access to .sx, but its handling of the new TLD is not particularly graceful.
Imagine a scenario in which you’ve just launched your dot-brand, and instead of arriving at your web site Chrome users are instead directed to Google (with the top sponsored result a link you’ve probably paid for).
ICANN is currently pondering ways to promote the universal acceptance of TLDs for precisely this reason.
Searches for the pop producer Will.I.Am prompt Chrome to attempt to find an address in the Armenian ccTLD.

5 Comments Tagged: .sx, chrome, google, ICANN, new gTLDs, public suffix, sxregistry, universal acceptance