Olympic-backed .sport bidder looking for partners

SportAccord, a worldwide coalition of sports federations with Olympic support, is looking for partners to help it with a possible .sport top-level domain bid.
In a request for proposals published today, the organization said it is looking not only for expertise and potential technical partners, but also financial backing:

The objective of SportAccord is to develop the best possible promotion of Sports Themed gTLDs by leveraging its unique relationship with its members, and to establish a usage policy that ensure respect of Sports key values.
SportAccord is therefore seeking to developing partnership with entities that could bring technical expertise and financial support to the common development of Sport themed gTLDs.

The 17-question RFP reveals that the organization has evidently done its homework.
Questions cover pertinent topics such as registrar integration, trademark protection, premium name monetization, and how to beat the ICANN threshold score for community-based applications.
The deadline for replying is September 30.
SportAccord, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, is an umbrella group comprising the international federations for over 100 sports, covering everything from football to tug of war.
The RFP states that the International Olympic Committee supports its gTLD initiative.
That’s an endorsement that may prove the deal-breaker for any .sport application. The IOC has been a vigorous defender of its rights in the new gTLD program.
Its lobbying efforts most recently compelled ICANN to build special protection for Olympic trademarks into the Applicant Guidebook itself (as well as lumbering the GNSO and ICANN staff with a bunch of unnecessary policy-development work).
Two other organizations have previously announced .sport applications
The loudest, Ron Andruff’s DotSport LLC, had appointed some of SportAccord’s member federations to its policy advisory council.
But SportAccord says in its RFP that “neither SportAccord nor any of its Members have made any commitment to support or participate in any sport themed gTLD.”
It looks like we may be looking at yet another push of the reset button on a well-lobbied gTLD.
The SportAccord RFP can be downloaded here.

What Europe’s demands mean for new gTLDs

The European Commission wants stronger government powers over ICANN’s new top-level domain approval process, according to leaked documents.
Six “informal background papers” obtained and published by .nxt yesterday indicate that the EC, perceiving snubs over the last six months, plans to take a hard line with ICANN.
The documents cover a lot of ground, including a discussion of the various mechanisms by which governments would be able to force ICANN to reject new gTLD applications.
This article covers just the bases related to new gTLDs.
As things currently stand, ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook gives governments three ways to register their objections to any given gTLD application. The EC wants two of them strengthened.
GAC Early Warning
The Governmental Advisory Committee may formally put an applicant on notice that one or more governments have a problem with their bid.
Any government can initiate an Early Warning “for any reason”, at any point during the 60-day public comment period that is currently scheduled to begin April 27.
The mechanism is designed to give applicants a chance to get out with their cash before a more formal objection is filed by the GAC or an individual government.
Applicants in receipt of such a warning can choose to withdraw at that point, receiving a partial refund of their fees, but it’s entirely voluntary.
Under the EC’s new proposals, a GAC Early Warning would trigger an additional requirement by the applicant to show the support of “the relevant internet community”.
Because there’s little chance of getting this provision into the Guidebook now, the EC wants this provision baked into ICANN’s IANA contract with the US Department of Commerce.
The IANA contract is currently the biggest stick governments have to beat ICANN with. It’s up for renewal before March, and it’s the US that decides what goes into the contract.
The European Commission paper on new gTLDs says:

The IANA contract should include a provision requiring applicants to positively demonstrate the support of the relevant Internet community in advance of formal consultation of the GAC (and other supporting organisations and advisory committees), in cases where there are prima facie grounds to believe that the application may raise a public policy concern.

The paper explains: “in other words, if the GAC issues an early warning, the applicant would be automatically required to demonstrate the support of the relevant Internet community”.
In the Guidebook today, only applicants that have self-designated as “community” applications have to show this level of support, using a strict scoring process.
The EC’s proposal could, hypothetically, force non-community applicants to show a similar level of support if a single government initiates an Early Warning in the GAC.
If there was a vanilla, non-community application for .gay, for example, an Early Warning spurred (anonymously) by Saudi Arabia, say, could force the applicant to provide evidence of community support.
How this evidence would be evaluated is unclear. It would depend on what final language the Department of Commerce puts into the IANA contract.
At a guess, it could be a matter for the ICANN board to decide, with the Damoclean sword of IANA non-compliance hanging over its decision.
Formal GAC Advice
The Guidebook today allows for over six months, from April 27 to November 12, for the GAC to formally object to any gTLD application.
The way the GAC will create this formal “GAC Advice on New gTLDs” is a black box. We probably won’t even be told which governments objected, or what level of support they received.
ICANN had tried to enforce certain transparency and procedural requirements on this mechanism, but the GAC told it to take a hike and ICANN bent over in the interests of expediency.
But any such Advice will nevertheless “create a strong presumption for ICANN that the application should not be approved”.
The ICANN board will technically still be able to overrule one of these objections, but it practice it seems unlikely. At the very least it’s not predictable.
Under the European Commission’s new proposals, this fail-safe would be weakened further:

The ICANN by-laws should be amended to ensure that consensus GAC advice is accepted as reflecting the global public interest, and should ICANN wish to reject such advice, it would bear the burden of demonstrating that the GAC advice would conflict with ICANN’s legal obligations or create problems for the stability or security of the Domain name System.

In other words, the bar for an ICANN board decision to overrule the GAC would be raised to only include cases where there was a legal or technical reason not to comply.
The GAC would have an effective veto on every decision ICANN is asked to make. The term “multi-stakeholder” would be subverted in almost textbook Orwellian fashion.
To have this proposal implemented, the EC suggests that ICANN and the GAC enter talks. There’s no talk of running to the US government to have it unilaterally imposed.
Reserved Words
Currently, all new gTLD registries will be forced to reserve strings such as country names from their spaces, and deal with individual governments to open them up.
The EC wants the list expanding to include basically any word that governments ask for, and it wants the US government to make this a condition of IANA contract renewal:

In relation to reserved and blocked names at the second level, the IANA contract should require the contractor to develop appropriate policies to allow governments and public administrations to identify names to be included in a reference list to be respected by all new gTLD operators.

This request appears to have been inspired by ICM Registry’s offer to block “culturally sensitive” strings from .xxx at the request of governments.
Yet again, we find global internet policy being driven by sex. What is it with these politicians?
Domain Name Takedown
Incredibly, the EC also wants the IANA contract to include a provision that would allow any government to ask any gTLD registry to turn off any domain:

The contractor [ICANN] should also be required to ensure that governments and public administrations can raise concerns about particular names after their registration if a serious public order concern is involved, and with a view to the registry “taking down” the name concerned.

This clearly hasn’t been thought through.
Facebook.com and Twitter.com have both been blamed recently for raising “serious public order concerns” in everything from the Egyptian revolution to the London riots.
The new powers the EC is discussing would have given the despotic former government of Egypt a legal basis for having Twitter shut down, in other words.
Cross-Ownership
Finally, the EC is still concerned, on competition grounds, about ICANN’s decision to drop the vertical separation rules that apply to registries and registrars.
It suggests that the IANA contract should create a new oversight body with an “extra-judicial review” function over ICANN, enabling its decisions to be challenged.
This would enable antitrust authorities in Europe or elsewhere to challenge the vertical integration decision without having to resort to the US courts.
Anyway
Overall, the proposals seem to represent a depressingly authoritarian ambition by the European Commission, as well as a disdain for the idea of the ICANN multi-stakeholder model and a shocking lack of respect for the rights of internet users.
While the documents are “informal background papers”, they do seem to give an indication of what certain elements within the EC think would make reasonable policy.
Whether the positions outlined in the papers became a reality would largely depend on whether the EC’s requests, if they were made, were compatible with US public policy.
As usual, the Department of Commerce still holds all the cards.

Fifth ad group opposes new gTLDs

The World Federation of Advertisers has become the fifth major coalition of advertising big-spenders to ask ICANN to rethink its new gTLD program.
Stephan Loerke, managing director of the Brussels-based organization, wrote to Rod Beckstrom, to “strongly urge ICANN to abandon the program in its current form”.
The letter (pdf) explicitly echoes statements first made by Bob Liodice of the US Association of National Advertisers, which is a WFA member.
To recap, these organizations are worried about consumer confusion, leading to phishing and cybersquatting and an increase in the cost of defending trademarks online.
Loerke said in a press release:

ICANN’s decision flies in the face of their own impact assessments, which highlight the potential dangers and massive costs that unlimited domain names could incur. Worse, it could lead to significant confusion among consumers and expose them to abuse by fraudulent operators.

The WFA is an umbrella trade group that comprises the national advertising trade groups of 50-odd countries. It also has 50-odd brand names as members.
Its members collectively spend $700 billion a year on advertising.
As well as the ANA, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Association of American Advertising Agencies and the UK Direct Marketing Association have recently opposed the new gTLD program.

Should new gTLDs be delayed?

Is the world ready for the new generic top-level domains program? Is ICANN ready?
It’s been well over two months since ICANN approved its new gTLD program, and the initial sense of excitement and purpose in the industry seems to have given way to virtual silence from ICANN and a profound lack of audible enthusiasm from the internet at large.
What’s going on with the program? Where’s the final Applicant Guidebook? Who are the experts ICANN is going to hire to actually decide which applications succeed or fail?
Is four months really sufficient time to put the world on notice that new gTLDs are coming and to give everybody enough opportunity to prepare?
Is anybody outside the industry even paying attention?
Read this quote (with my emphasis) from Friday’s wrap-up session at the .nxt conference in San Francisco and see if you can guess whose mouth it came out of.

My takeaways, if I can run through them quickly…
…a sense of relief that this program is finally underway as of June 20 has suddenly now turned into a worry. There’s a whole lot of people who can’t believe it’s happening, and there’s a sense of worry that it’s all going to happen too fast. So that’s quite interesting. There’s a hell of a lot that has to be done between now and launch.
Some things are not yet done… We haven’t got the information about the [Trademark] Clearinghouse yet, we don’t know what the [Governmental Advisory Committee] processes are going to be, and we actually have to design registry systems and explain those two to customers and show how they are going to fit together and we can’t. So there’s a problem there about the rush.

You may be thinking that those are the words of some naysayer in a stuffed shirt – a hater from the trademark lobby or the advertising industry who wants to put the stoppers on new gTLDs.
Actually, that’s the opinion of Peter Dengate Thrush, who was chairman of the ICANN board of directors when it voted to approve the program, despite concerns that it wasn’t ready yet, in June.
Dengate Thrush is now of course executive chairman of Minds + Machines, which is in the position of actually having to deal with the program in its incomplete state.
His words were, I believe, offered up as an analysis of the mood of the conference, rather than some kind of mea culpa, if you were wondering about the context or tone.
Nevertheless, he had a point.
Here are some of things that don’t seem to have been finalized yet:
The Applicant Guidebook
Incredibly, the most recent version of the application rulebook posted on the ICANN web site dates from May. It’s still essentially still an almost-done draft document.
ICANN’s board voted in June to amend the Applicant Guidebook before the first round of applications opens.
So, where is it? Where’s the final Guidebook?
Who’s going to sign a check investing in new gTLDs when the rules are still open to change?
Still minding the GAC
How, precisely, will the Governmental Advisory Committee decide whether to intervene to thwart a gTLD application on public policy grounds?
ICANN has agreed to let the GAC make up its own rules governing how it reaches consensus before it objects to applications, but so far it has not said what those rules are going to be.
If you think you might apply for a potentially controversial gTLD string – or even if you don’t – you still don’t have enough information today to make a fully informed risk analysis.
Your best strategy right now might be to ensure that your string complies with Sharia, or to pay off a bunch of government officials to ensure they fight your corner.
Where are the experts?
ICANN has not yet named the company or individuals who have been or will be hired to process the hundreds of gTLD applications that are likely to be received next year.
As Dengate Thrush noted, it also hasn’t appointed a Trademark Clearinghouse, which is a critical component of two mandatory new gTLD rights protection mechanisms.
Currently, it’s hard to say for certain what integration between registries and the Clearinghouse will entail financially or technologically.
That may not be an enormous problem, but it could make writing an application slightly trickier.
Watching the watchmen
ICANN is in receipt of letters from competition authorities in the US and European Union, telling it in fairly blunt terms that its decision to allow registries and registrars to integrate is Bad Policy.
The rules that separate registrars like Go Daddy from registries such as VeriSign have been good for consumers, they say, and should be kept in place under the new gTLD regime.
ICANN, also in its June 20 vote, has already agreed to talk to these authorities about possibly scaling back the proposed liberalization of the vertical integration rules.
But if this is already happening, it’s happening behind closed doors, because we’ve not heard a peep about it from ICANN or the two governments since June.
If this situation escalates when everybody gets back from vacation, I will not be surprised.
Where’s the outreach?
ICANN has promised a four-month communications campaign before the start of the first round of applications. That means it has to kick off by September 12, just two weeks from now.
This campaign actually began at the press conference about half an hour after the June 20 board vote, ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said at the time, but apart from a couple of plaintive cries for help there’s been precious little visible outreach since then.
Director Bertrand de La Chapelle evidently gave Beckstrom a hard time about this during a board meeting a month ago, according to the minutes.
A new ICANN web site devoted to new gTLDs is expected to launch next month, and I understand that staff including Beckstrom will hit the road for a world tour around the same time.
But given the recent mock outrage from ad industry shills such as the Association of National Advertisers, it’s arguably a little late for ICANN to start to worry about framing the issue.
Most people reading about new gTLDs in the press the last few weeks probably came away thinking new gTLDs are nothing but a money grab by registries and cybersquatters/domainers.
(It is that, of course, but it’s lots of other nicer things too.)
From a public relations perspective, ICANN will be starting on the back foot. Its outreach efforts may turn out to be not be so much about educating the world about its program but re-educating it.
Oh, and it only has $750,000 to pull off this feat.
As a very wise man said at .nxt on Friday: “The size and scale of that [budget] doesn’t really match up to the problem it’s trying to address.”
(Yeah, that was Dengate Thrush again)
Welcome to the cheap seats
ICANN has committed $2 million from reserves to a mechanism whereby needy applicants from developing nations will be able to get a discount (TBC) on their application fees.
That mechanism does not yet exist. Such applicants are today at a disadvantage compared to their wealthier competitors when it comes to planning applications and raising funds.
A volunteer working group known as JAS has been working out the details, meeting by phone two or three times a week, but reaching consensus seems to have been a very tough slog.
Policies developed from the bottom up have a convoluted chain of custody before they get approved. A deadline missed by a day or two can delay the ICANN rubber stamp by weeks.
The way things look today, the JAS applicant support policy is going to be cutting it extremely fine if it wants to make it before the ICANN board’s October meeting in Dakar.
Wither round two?
Perhaps the most intractable problem underlying the whole program is the absence of a launch date for the second-round application window.
Speakers at the .nxt conference last week reckoned lawsuits over individual contested gTLDs are inevitable, and that they could delay the second round until as late as 2017, if it happens at all.
It’s in that context that large companies, already nervous about entering into a new, unmeasurable, unproven marketing paradigm, are being asked to commit potentially millions to new gTLDs today.
It’s arguably like being asked, in 1991, to pay $500,000 for sex.com, with no idea whether this newfangled “hypertext” thing is going to take off.
Sounds like a great deal today, but back then it would have sounded like a 419 scam.
As Yahoo lawyer J Scott Evans said at .nxt, many companies feel they have “a gun to their heads”.
It’s hardly surprising some of them have persuaded their trade groups to lobby against the program, threatening to bring their pocket Congressmen down on ICANN’s head and/or file a lawsuit or two.
Which brings me to my headline
Which brings me to my headline. Would another delay be good for the new gTLD program?
If the ANA were to sic its lawyers on ICANN tomorrow, would a temporary restraining order that delayed the program by a few month actually be healthy for it in the longer term?
A great many people and organizations that could make valuable contributions to the domain name industry will not have heard about new gTLDs before June 20.
A delay before January could give ICANN and its community a bit more time to smooth away the rough edges of the program and to address the issues that have not yet been resolved.
It could give potential applicants from outside the established community more time to decide whether to engage with the program, more time to raise funds or secure budgets, and more time to develop their new gTLD application strategies.
I’m referring here not only to large corporations with lengthy budgeting cycles, but also to entrepreneurs with cool ideas and meager resources that perhaps need more time to be able to get on board.
Could a delay also increase the proportion of applicants from outside Europe and North America, and the proportion of IDN gTLD applicants who truly understand their markets?
Bluntly, would a short delay in the launch, whether it came about as a result of legal action or not, make round one of the ICANN new gTLD program less of a clusterfuck?
Yeah, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here
The best quote I heard during my remote participation in the .nxt conference last week was offered up by Brian Larson from DotMLS as “Larson’s Corollary to Newton’s Third Law”:

Any discussion about what the post-new-gTLD world is going to look like is inherently speculative… For any argument about the post-new-gTLD world there is an equally plausible but opposite argument.

For the avoidance of doubt, if there was any doubt in your mind, that maxim certainly applies to the opinions expressed in this article. I could just as easily write 2,000 words arguing for the opposing view.

NetNames puts gTLD.com domain to good use

European registrar Group NBT has a pretty great domain for its new generic top-level domains consulting business: gTLD.com.
Under its NetNames corporate registrar brand, the company is targeting the “.brand” market, like so many others, judging by its recently relaunched web site.
Its services include pre-application consulting, help with applications, and ongoing management services, provided through its relationships with registry infrastructure partners.
It will also keep track of other ICANN gTLD applications and alert clients about potential cases of trademark infringement.
One thing’s for sure, new gTLD applicants in general are spoiled for choice now when it comes to selecting a consultant.

ICANN vice president quits before he starts

ICANN’s recently announced vice president of Europe, Thomas Spiller, will not be joining the organization after all.
His appointment to the new position was announced June 23. He was due to start work heading ICANN’s Brussels office on Monday.
I understand Spiller has chosen a position at another company instead, and that his decision may have predated the announcement of CEO Rod Beckstrom’s July 2012 departure earlier this month.
A policy expert, he previously worked for the French Prime Minister’s Office and the software company SAS, according to an ICANN press release (pdf).
The European VP job is now being advertised once more on ICANN’s hiring page.
The news of Spiller’s non-showing at ICANN was first revealed this morning by GNSO chair Stephane Van Gelder.

Domainer Jan Barta invests in dotFree

The Czech company hoping to apply to ICANN for the .free top-level domain next year has secured an undisclosed investment from local domainer Jan Barta.
Jeremie Godreche from dotFree described the deal as “an active and long term relationship”.
Barta is the founder of Elephant Orchestra, a domain investment and lead generation company based in Prague. You can read a recent interview with him in the Prague Post here.
DotFree appears to have recently overhauled its web site also.
It now has a planned launch schedule that would see a .free founders program open in January 2012 and its sunrise period begin a year later.
Now there’s confidence.
I expect .free to be a contested gTLD, and we won’t find out until April at the earliest how many other applicants are also chasing it.
The company plans to monetize .free by charging for 200,000 premium names and imposing an annual upgrade fee on registrants with more than one non-premium domain.
It has had 97,000 pre-registrations since last November.

Now you can outsource your whole gTLD

It’s already common practice for domain name registries to outsource their technical operations to a back-end provider such as VeriSign or Afilias, but a new company hopes that new gTLD registries will want to go one step further.
Sedari, which appears to have soft-launched at the .nxt conference today, wants successful new gTLD applicants to outsource their back-office functions too.
The company, headed by former ICANN policy advisor Liz Williams, “helps string owners outsource the risk and responsibility of running a registry in compliance with ICANN’s contracts”, according to its site.
I understand this means functions such as billing, support, compliance, and liaising with the back-end registry and the front-end registrars.
I guess it’s going to be possible for a successful gTLD applicant to sign a registry contract with ICANN and then do very little to actually manage its day-to-day operation.
A registry that outsources its technical infrastructure to the likes of Neustar and its back office to Sedari will presumably be free to focus on nothing but marketing.
Sedari is staffed by a number of familiar faces.
Its CFO is Kevin Wilson, who had the same role at ICANN until January, and former ICANN director Dennis Jennings is on the board.
Its CTO is Wayne MacLaurin, who was previously CTO of Momentous. Jothan Frakes, formerly with Minds + Machines, is senior VP of channel management.

Direct marketers join anti-gTLD bandwagon

The UK Direct Marketing Association has added its voice to the collection of advertising trade groups that oppose ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
DMA executive director Chris Combemale said in a statement:

Creating a tranche of new internet domain names will be extremely costly to businesses. As well as the associated costs of registering new domain names and spending money to attract customers to multiple domains, businesses face the legal and financial headache of having to contend with cybersquatters grabbing specific domains.
Customised domain names won’t offer brands any enhanced marketing possibilities because consumers can easily search for specific information with the current domain name system.
Companies are already hard pressed to find cost savings in these tough trading times; adding a further financial burden that won’t reap any commercial benefits cannot be justified.

The organization said it plans to formally ask ICANN to withdraw or revise the program.
The Association of National Advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the American Association of Advertising Agencies have already made similar calls.
The DMA UK has over 800 members, according to its web site.

Most new gTLDs will fail

We’re going to see hundreds of new gTLDs over the coming years, but we’re also going to see potentially hundreds of failures.
That’s the view being espoused by some of the biggest cheerleaders of ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program, including its former chairman, at the .nxt conference this week.
During the opening session on Wednesday, a panel of experts was asked to imagine what the domain name industry might look like in 2017, five years after the first new gTLDs go live.
“My assumption is that many TLDs will have completely failed to live up to their promoters’ hype,” said Minds + Machines executive chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, whose last action as ICANN chair was pushing through approval of the program. “But on the other hand many of them, and I hope a majority of them, will be thriving.”
Anyone expecting to build a business on defensive registrations better think again, panelists said.
“Many ill-conceived generic-term TLDs will have failed by that point, especially those generic term TLDs that are taking comfort in the .xxx Sunrise Part B revenue model,” said Paul McGrady of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.
“There’s definitely going to be burnout in the brand-owner community, so don’t expect the brand owners to show up to to fuel that,” he said.
Others, such as Tucows CEO Elliot Noss, went further.
“I think there’ll be more failures than successes and I’m not fussed by that,” said Noss. “For the users in the namespace, it’s not like they’re left high and dry.”
He compared failing gTLDs to the old Angelfire and Geocities homepage services that were quite popular in the late 1990s, but which fizzled when the cost of domains and hosting came down.
But while the disappearance of an entire gTLD would take all of its customers with it, a la Geocities, that’s unlikely to happen, panelists acknowledged.
ICANN’s program requires applicants to post a bond covering three years of operations, and it will also select a registry provider to act as an emergency manager if a gTLD manager fails.
When gTLD businesses fail, and they will, they’re designed to fail gracefully.
In addition, taking on an extra gTLD after its previous owner goes out of business would be little burden to an established registry provider — once the transition work was done, a new string would be a extra renewal revenue stream with possibly little additional overhead.