Neustar leading the new gTLD back-end scores so far

New gTLD applications backed by registry service provider Neustar scored the highest results in the first batch of Initial Evaluation results.
All 27 of the applications that have had their IE results revealed by ICANN so far have easily passed the 22 out of 30 points threshold required for a passing score on the technical evaluation.
In most cases, each application had its technical questions answered by the applicant’s chosen back-end provider.
Eight different back-ends are involved in the first 27 bids, some with more applications than others.
Here’s the average score out of 30 for each company.
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Only Neustar and Verisign scored the full 30 points in an application with their name on it, but their averages were reduced by applications in which they fared less well.
It’s very early days, of course, with the full set of IE results not due to be completely published until August.
We’ll be tracking these scores as more results are released on DI PRO.

Five interesting nuggets from the first batch of gTLD evaluations

ICANN gave many in the industry cause for celebration on Friday when it released its first batch of 27 new gTLD applications that have passed Initial Evaluation.
The plan is to release 30 per week, ramping up to 100 at some point in future, but three applications in the first 30 still have change requests or clarifying questions being processed.
Here are some interesting bits of information we’ve gleaned from the first batch.
Donuts has passed its background checks
Donuts has had the first of its new gTLD applications approved. This means that the evaluation team doing background screening found no reason to be fail the company due to its executives’ track records.
During the public comment period last year, Donuts’ opponents said the company should be barred from getting any new gTLDs because of its close ties to Demand Media, a company with a record of adverse UDRP decisions.
It was also claimed that a Donuts director was involved in cybersquatting the Olympic and Disney brands, but it turned out the director in question had left the company in late 2011.
But ICANN’s evaluation team appears to have given Donuts the all clear.
The Donuts application that has passed Initial Evaluation, for .商店 (shop/store), is one of 199 applications, each filed by unique corporate shells, that share a parent, Dozen Donuts LLC.
The balance of Donuts’ applying companies are owned by Covered TLD LLC, believed to be its joint venture with Demand Media. All 307 are signed up to use Demand Media’s registry back-end.
Seven IDN scripts passed IE
New gTLDs in seven internationalized domain name scripts — Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Korean, German, Cyrillic — have passed through Initial Evaluation.
Transliterations of .com/.net are apparently fine
Some of Verisign’s applications for transliterations of .com and .net in scripts such as Chinese and Hindi have passed IE, meaning the evaluators weren’t worried about possible clashes with their legacy equivalents.
There’s been some concern from some parts of the world that because the applied-for strings are meaningless in the relevant languages, but sound like “com” and “net” when spoken, that it could cause confusion.
New back-end providers have cause for celebration
While there was little doubt that back-end providers Verisign, Neustar, Afilias and CORE would receive passing grades by ICANN — they all run gTLDs already — new market entrants did not have reasons for the same confidence.
However, ARI Registry Services, Demand Media, CentralNIC, KISA, KSRegistry and KNET are all named back-ends for passing applications in the first batch.
This should come as a cause for celebration for these companies, and a relief for their clients.
Because many applications used the same boilerplate back-end text, there’s good reason to believe that other bids using these registry providers are likely to pass the technical portion of Initial Evaluation too.
Afilias doesn’t have any passes yet
Top-three player Afilias, so far, does not have any passing apps.
One of its clients is at position #7 in the priority queue, but it’s one of the three applications in the top 30 to be still chasing follow-up questions or change requests with ICANN.
Probably nothing to worry about here.

Seventh new gTLD bid withdrawn

ICANN has now received seven requests to withdraw new gTLD applications, according to documentation published today.
While we learned today that Google and KSB AG are behind four of the junked bids, the identities of the other three are not yet known.
ICANN has said that it will not reveal the withdrawing applications until all the formalities, such as refunds, have been finalized.
The updated stats came in a slide deck (pdf) set to be used in an ICANN webinar scheduled for noon UTC today.
The slides also reveal the aggregate status of applications’ progress through Initial Evaluation.
As you can see from the slide below, over a quarter of applications have had their String Similarity Review already. Just 65 have had their Geographic Names Review, while 127 and 141 have had their technical and financial evaluations respectively.

ICANN also states that there have been 57 requests for changes to applications — up from 49 at the last count — and that so far nobody has filed a formal objection against any bid.

Infodump: what we learned about new gTLDs today

ICANN held a webinar today in which it detailed a whole lot of the current thinking about the evaluation phase of the new gTLD program, including some new deadlines and target dates.
Senior vice president and acting program head Kurt Pritz fought through a cold to give new gTLD applicants more information and clarification than they’d received since Prague in June.
These are some of the things we learned:

• Three applications have been withdrawn already. We don’t know which ones.
• There have been 49 requests to change applications. Again, we don’t know which ones yet. ICANN is in the process of finalizing a threshold check to allow or deny these changes, details of which it expects to publish soon.
• “Clarifying Questions” are the new buzzword. CQs — yes, they have an acronym — are additional questions the evaluators need to ask applicants before they can score parts of their application. The vast majority of applications are going to get at least one CQ. The two-week deadline to respond to these questions, as described in the Applicant Guidebook, will likely be ignored in many cases.
• About 90% of applications will get a CQ about their financial status. This mainly concerns their Continuing Operations Instrument, the super-complex and expensive back-up cash commitments each applicant had to secure. But applicants who got letters of credit don’t need to panic if their banks have recently had their ratings downgraded.
• Another 40% can expect to get questions about their technical plans. Some applicants may have relied too heavily on their back-end providers to describe their security plans, it seems.
• About half of all geographic gTLD applications have not yet supplied letters of support from the relevant government. This was already anticipated and is accounted for by Guidebook processes however, Pritz said.
• Don’t expect an answer to the metering question any time soon. Batching may be dead, but ICANN does not expect to figure out its replacement — a way to throttle new gTLDs’ go-live dates — until October. There’s an open comment period on this and plenty more jaw-wagging to come.
• Objections will come before Initial Evaluation results. This sucks if you’re a likely objector. The deadline for filing objections is January 12, 2013, but evaluation results are not expected until June 2013 at the earliest. This means the much cheaper option of waiting to see if an application is rejected before paying for an objection is no longer a viable strategy. But it’s good for applicants, which will get a little more visibility into their likelihood of success and their costs.
• Contention sets will probably be revealed in November. The String Similarity Panel, which decides which gTLDs are too similar to each other to co-exist, is not expected to give its results to ICANN until late October, four and a half months after the June 13 Reveal Day — so applicants won’t know the full size of their contention sets until probably a couple of weeks after that.
• The new gTLD public comment period will probably be extended. After several requests, ICANN is very probably going to give everyone more time to comment on the 1,930 1,927 applications, beyond the August 12 scheduled closing date. An announcement is likely on Friday.

New gTLD winners could be named June 2013

ICANN has sketched out a tentative timetable for the evaluation of its new generic top-level domain applications that would see the first successful gTLDs appear over a year from now.
But the plan has little meat on its bones, and ICANN has admitted that it still doesn’t know exactly how the evaluation process is going to pan out.
In a new call for comments, ICANN confirmed that all 1,930 applications are going to be evaluated at the same time, and that the evaluators have already started work.
The winners and losers from Initial Evaluation, ICANN said, could be announced June or July 2013.
This would mean that the first new gTLDs would start going live on the internet “in late third quarter of 2013, six months later than originally expected”, ICANN said.
But which successful applications would start hitting the root first is still wide open to debate.
The idea that the applications would be processed in batches of 500 or thereabouts, is now pretty much dead. That’s been obvious since digital archery was killed off, but it’s now confirmed.
ICANN said it has a “tentative project plan” that “foresees the processing of applications in a single batch, and simultaneous release of results” about a year from now.
But with “batching” dead, we now have a “metering” problem.
Hypothetically, as many as 1,409 unique gTLD applications could emerge successfully from evaluation at the same time, in June or July next year.
That’s the theoretical ceiling; in reality the number will be substantially reduced by withdrawals, objections and contention.
But before any of them can go live the applicants need to negotiate and/or sign registry agreements with ICANN and undergo formal pre-delegation technical testing. That creates two bottlenecks at ICANN in its legal and IANA departments.
ICANN now wants to know how to “meter” successfully evaluated applications, to smooth out the roll-out so that no more than 1,000 new gTLDs are delegated in any given year.
An idea that emerged in Prague was to order applications according to how “clean” they were, as measured many clarifying questions the evaluators had to ask the applicants. But that idea has now been dismissed as “unworkable”, ICANN said.
ICANN’s board of directors had promised to make about three weeks after the Prague meeting – a deadline that passed over a week ago – but it’s now turning to the community for ideas.
Before August 19, it wants to know:

1. Should the metering or smoothing consider releasing evaluation results, and transitioning applications into the contract execution and pre-delegation testing phases, at different times?
a. How can applications be allocated to particular release times in a fair and equitable way?
b. Would this approach provide sufficient smoothing of the delegation rate?
c. Provide reasoning for selecting this approach.
2. Should the metering or smoothing be accomplished by downstream metering of application processing (i.e., in the contract execution, pre-delegation testing or delegation phases)?
a. How can applications be allocated to a particular timing in contract execution, pre-delegation testing, or delegation in a fair and equitable way?
b. Provide reasoning for selecting this approach.
3. Include a statement describing the level of importance that the order of evaluation and delegation has for your application.

My hunch based on conversations in Prague is that the majority answer to question 1 will be “No” and that the majority answer to question 2 will be “Yes”, but that’s just a hunch at this point.

ICANN begins evaluating new gTLD applications

ICANN has already started formally evaluating some of the 1,930 new generic top-level domain applications it has received, according to sources.
Technical and financial evaluations are believed to have been going on for several days at the three outside firms ICANN has contracted with – Ernst & Young, KPMG and JAS Global Advisors.
ICANN staff said a few times during the Prague meeting last month that July 12 was the kick-off date for evaluations, but I’m led to believe they may have started a little later than that.
Nevertheless, they’re underway.
What’s not yet known is how – or if – the 1,930 applications will be batched into more manageable chunks.
The last official word from ICANN came on June 28, when Cherine Chalaby, chair of the board’s new gTLD program committee, said an update would be provided in about three weeks.
With that admittedly vague deadline now in the past, we can only assume that the publication of a new timetable is imminent.