In a first for new gTLDs, Aquitaine dumps geo bid

The authority for the French region of Aquitaine has become the first applicant for a geographic new gTLD to pull its application apparently of its own accord.
Région d’Aquitaine’s bid for .aquitaine was withdrawn today, despite the fact that the applicant was already in the contracting stage with ICANN.
A handful of other geographic gTLD applications have been withdrawn previously, but only due to disputes between the applicant and the governments of the regions they wanted to represent.
.aquitaine is the first would-be geographic gTLD to be pulled after passing through the evaluation stage of the program.
Aquitaine is one of France’s 27 formal regions, with a population of over three million.

$10 million to move to a dot-brand? Quebec says “non”

One of the biggest hypothetical barriers to the adoption of dot-brand gTLDs has always been the likely cost of migration, but until now nobody’s really thrown around any figures.
The Government of Quebec has decided against rebranding to the forthcoming .quebec gTLD, saying the migration would cost it CAD 12 million ($10.6 million), according to local reports.
The Canadian Press press reported over the weekend that Quebec will still to its existing gouv.qc.ca addresses and therefore save itself a bundle of cash at a time when austerity measures are in place.
The timing of the revelation is unfortunate for PointQuebec, the .quebec registry, which is due to go to general availability tomorrow.
The application for .quebec, a protected geographic string under ICANN rules, was made with the support of the Canadian province.
The decision by the government is not a death sentence for the gTLD, but it is the loss of a significant anchor tenant at the worst possible moment.
It also highlights what we all already knew — for a large organization, changing your domain name is complicated and expensive.
Not only do myriad IT systems need to be migrated to the new domain, you also need to think about things as trivial as letter heads and signage.
The cost of such a switch is a key reason we’re unlikely to see many dot-brand owners making a full-scale switch to their new gTLD in the short term.

GAC kills off two more new gTLD bids

A new gTLD applicant has withdrawn two of its Chinese-language applications after failing to secure the necessary government support.
Guangzhou YU Wei Information Technology Co withdrew its applications for .深圳 (.shenzhen) and .广州 (.guangzhou).
Both are the names of very large cities in southern China.
The ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee had previously issued official Advice against both bids.
The applicant had failed to get a passing score on its Initial Evaluation earlier this year, with ICANN ruling that governmental “support or non-objection was either not provided or did not meet the criteria”.
To get a geographic gTLD, you need to prove local government support, something which the applicant seems to have been unable to provide during Extended Evaluation.
Weirdly, Guangzhou YU Wei has previously passed EE for .佛山 (.foshan) and IE for .广东 (.guangdong), which are both also Chinese geographic names.

Geo gTLD bidders propose new constituency

Applicants for geographic gTLDs voted unanimously to form a new ICANN constituency last week.
According to minutes of a meeting hosted by .london applicant London & Partners in London last Thursday, 20 applicants voted in favor of a constituency and nobody voted for the alternatives.
Not every geo was in attendance, however. Twenty votes represents less than a third of the overall geographic gTLD applicant base.
A new constituency would likely join registries and registrars in the Contracted Parties House of the Generic Name Supporting Organization.
A constituency for dot-brand applicants, the Brand Registry Group, is also currently being formed.

Amazon’s dot-brand likely doomed as US withdraws geo objection

The US government is set to allow the Governmental Advisory Committee to kill off Amazon’s application for .amazon, along with eight other new gTLDs with geographic flavors.
In a position paper published last night, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said:

the United States is willing in Durban to abstain and remain neutral on .shenzen (IDN in Chinese), .persiangulf, .guangzhou (IDN in Chinese), .amazon (and IDNs in Japanese and Chinese), .patagonia, .yun, and .thai, thereby allowing the GAC to present consensus objections on these strings to the Board, if no other government objects.

According to a GAC source, US protests were the “only reason” the GAC was unable to reach a consensus objection to these applications during the Beijing meeting three months ago.
Consensus would strengthen the objection, giving the ICANN board the presumption that the applications, some of which have already passed Initial Evaluation, should not be approved.
None of the nine applications in question met ICANN’s strict definition of a “geographic” string, but they nevertheless look geographic enough to raise concerns with GAC members.
Amazon’s application for .amazon raised the eyebrows of the Latin American countries that share the Amazonia region.
The company has been in talks with these GAC members since Beijing. If it wants to secure .amazon, it has a little over a week to address their concerns, if it wants to avoid an objection.
While the US is now promising to drop its objection to the GAC’s objection, it does not appear to have changed its position, claiming that governments have no rights to geographic strings. NTIA said:

The United States affirms our support for the free flow of information and freedom of expression and does not view sovereignty as a valid basis for objecting to the use of terms, and we have concerns about the effect of such claims on the integrity of the process.
…
the United States is not aware of an international consensus that recognizes inherent governmental rights in geographic terms.

It’s calling for a rethink of the process, during the mandatory review of the new gTLD program that ICANN must conduct before accepting a second round of applications.
Given that the GAC currently has the ability to object to any string for any reason, it’s difficult to see how a review could achieve the NTIA’s goal without reining in the GAC’s powers.