New gTLD reveal day is probably June 13

ICANN is set to reveal its list of new generic top-level domain applications on or around June 13, according to several sources.
My understanding is that the date has not yet been set in stone – it could be a day or so either side – but that June 13 is the current target.
The unveiling of all 2,000+ applications is expected to be accompanied by a press conference and panel discussion in London, both of which will be webcast for those unable to attend in person.
Confirming the venue for this event is, I believe, one of the factors contributing to the current uncertainty about the date.
A June 13 date means that the “digital archery” batching process will – barring unforeseen circumstances – kick off at some point during the first two weeks of June and end after the reveal.
ICANN said earlier this week that the archery process will start before reveal day and will last for three weeks.

New gTLD applicant asks for money back

At least one new generic top-level domain applicant has requested a full $185,000 refund of its application fee, according to ICANN.
This exchange is from last night’s Twitter chat with ICANN executives:

@icann Has anyone asked for a refund yet? #icannchat

— Kevin Murphy (@DomainIncite) May 22, 2012

A11: As of last night we had received two new requests for refund since full refund offer: one for $185k & one for $5K #newgTLD #ICANNchat

— ICANN (@ICANN) May 22, 2012

It’s interesting that the answer was qualified with “since full refund offer”, suggesting there may have been more requests for refunds prior to ICANN’s decision to up the maximum refund from $180,000 to $185,000.
It’s not known which applicant asked for the refund or why.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brands are Pool.com’s surprise digital archery clients

Companies applying to ICANN for “dot-brand” top-level domains are among those signing up for Pool.com’s new digital archery service, according to Rob Hall, CEO of parent Momentous.
The company launched its Digital Archery Engine last month, not too long after ICANN confirmed its controversial method of batching new gTLD applications for processing.
Now, Pool is receiving interest from not only mass-market generic string applicants, but also dot-brands.
“It’s a wider swath of TLDs that I thought originally,” said Hall. “At first I thought for sure the generics and the domains that might be in competition.”
“It’s amazing to me that a lot of people out there are saying the brands don’t care, the brands are doing this just defensively, the brands couldn’t care less about going first… but a lot of them do,” he said.
“A lot of them are saying ‘I want to be in that first batch’, which I wouldn’t have necessarily expected,” he added.
He said he had no idea what the motivations are for these brands.
“Our job is to get them in the first batch, not to ask them why they want to be there,” he said.
Hall said it wasn’t clear how many clients Pool would eventually sign up to the service, but said he expects it to be definitely much more than 50.
ICANN’s digital archery system – which will batch applicants according to which can most accurately send a message over the internet to a target time – was poorly received by most people.
Unsurprisingly, Hall is not one of those people.
Pool is one of several companies that have been competing to register expiring domain names for the better part of a decade, so its systems have been fine-tuned for sending messages over the internet quickly.
While the big registries such as .com use the EPP protocol, some of the registries Pool interacts with use HTTP, which seems to be ICANN’s preferred option for digital archery.
Hall said Pool aims for latency of less than 6 milliseconds. Its servers are positioned topologically close to registries – typically one or two hops – and the software measures monitors network conditions.
“The key is being able to detect what is the latency and to predict it, then factor that into the engine to say ‘When do I fire?’,” he said.
He does not anticipate the CAPTCHAs or other Turing tests presenting a problem – Pool would simply bring a human into the equation.
The Digital Archery Engine is not cheap. If Pool gets you into the first batch, you’re $25,000 out of pocket. If you’re in the top half of batches (batch three of five counts as top half) it’s $10,000.
The company was singled out recently by ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency as an “insider” exploiting the digital archery system as a “revenue extraction opportunity”.
A letter highly critical of the system from IPC chair Steve Metallitz said:

This arcane and seemingly arbitrary batching method will also reinforce the widespread impression that all ICANN procedures are dominated by “insiders” with contractual relationships to ICANN, who will surely know best how to manipulate this initiative to their own benefit, or that of their paying customers. It is difficult to reconcile such an outcome with ICANN’s obligation to act in the public interest.

Hall said was happy for the free advertising. “I’d like to thank them,” he said.
But he said Pool isn’t “manipulating” anything.
“They’ve called this ‘digital archery’,” he said. “It’s a game to see who’s best at it. That’s what they’ve designed. We’re not gaming anything. And we’re not offering this to insiders, we’re offering this to everyone.”

Nominet involved in seven gTLD applications

Nominet, the .uk registry, is providing registry services for seven new generic top-level domain applications, according to CEO Lesley Cowley.
Cowley told Nominet’s Annual General Meeting today that five of the applications are for dot-brands, a Nominet spokesperson said.
The identities of the clients are currently protected by non-disclosure agreements.
The other two bids are for .wales and .cymru, which Nominet is applying for with the approval of the Welsh government.
The other big European ccTLD operator to already announce its applications, Austria’s Nic.at, said recently that it has submitted 11 applications, six of which were geographic.

ICANN names $25m gTLD objector

French international law expert Alain Pellet has been appointed Independent Objector for the first round of ICANN’s new generic top-level domain program.
Pellet has worked as a law professor at University Paris Ouest, Nanterre-La Défense since 1990, according to his 26-page resume (pdf).
He’s also represented governments at the International Court of Justice and chaired the International Law Commission of the United Nations.
With an expected 2,000-plus new gTLD applications, Pellet will command a budget of around $25 million, funded by application fees, over the three years the first round is expected to take.
Even with so many applications, I’m struggling to imagine scenarios in which so much money would be required.
The IO’s job is to object to new gTLD applications “in the best interests of global internet users”.
Pellet’s team will be limited to the Community Objection and Limited Public Interest Objection mechanisms outlined in the program’s Applicant Guidebook.
The IO is there to object when opposition to a gTLD has been raised but no formal objection has been filed by, for example, an affected community.
That the IO exists is an excellent reason to file comments on applications you’re opposed to – if no complaints are received via the public comment process, Pellet will be unable to object.