First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop

ICANN has released for comment the first public drafts of seven sections of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook, the first of what are expected to be quarterly comment periods for the next 18 months or so.

As I previewed last week, the documents cover topics including geographic names, blocked strings, Universal Acceptance, conflicts of interest and freedom of expression.

The documents were prepared by the ICANN staff/community Subsequent Procedures Implementation Review Team, based on the recommendations of a working group reporting to the Generic Names Supporting Organization a few years ago.

ICANN says it wants to know whether everyone thinks the AGB text it has come up with is consistent with those recommendations.

The comment period is open until March 19. ICANN hopes to have the full AGB ready by May 2025, with the next application round opening April 2026.

ICANN rejects a whole bunch of new gTLD policy stuff

ICANN has delivered some bad news for dot-brands, applicants from poorer countries, and others, at the weekend rejecting several items of new gTLD policy advice that the community spent years cooking up.

The board of directors on Sunday approved a scorecard of determinations, including the rejection (or non-adoption) of seven GNSO recommendations that it deems “would not be in the best interests of the ICANN community or ICANN”.

In reality, it’s the latter that seems to have been foremost in the board’s mind; most of the rejections appear to be geared toward reducing ICANN Org’s legal or financial exposure.

Notably, dot-brands are denied some of the relief from cumbersome or expensive requirements that the GNSO had wanted rid of.

The board rejected a recommendation that would exempt them from the Continued Operations Instrument — a financial bond used to pay an Emergency Back-End Registry Operator should the applicant go out of business.

“[T]he Board is concerned that an exemption from an COI for Spec 9 applications would have financial impact on ICANN since there would be no fund to draw from if such a registry went into EBERO,” the board wrote.

It also rejected a request to exempt dot-brands from rules requiring them to contractually ban and monitor abuse in their TLDs. The GNSO had argued that single-registrant TLDs do not suffer abuse, but the board said this could lead to abuse from compromised domains going unaddressed.

“The Board concludes that Recommendation 9.2, if implemented, could lead to DNS abuse for second-level registrations in a single-registrant TLD going unaddressed, unobserved, and unmitigated,” it said.

Applicants hoping to benefit from the Applicant Support Program — which in 2012 offered heavily discounted application fees to poorer applicants — also got some bad news.

The GNSO wants the support to extend to other costs such as application-writing services and lawyers, which naturally enough put the frighteners on the board, which noted “such expansion of support could raise the possibility of inappropriate use of resources (e.g. inflated expenses, private benefit concerns, and other legal or regulatory concerns)”.

The board also rejected a couple of recommendations that could be seen as weakening its role as ultimate authority over all things gTLD.

It rejected a proposal to remove the controversial covenant not to sue (CNTS) from the application process unless other recommendations related to appeals processes are implemented.

ICANN said that because it has not yet approved these other recommendations, it has rejected this recommendation.

The board also rejected a recommendation that would have limited its ability to reject a gTLD application to only when permitted to do so by the rules set out in the Applicant Guidebook.

The idea was to prevent applications being arbitrarily rejected, but the board said this “may unduly limit ICANN’s discretion to reject an application in yet-to-be-identified future circumstance(s)”.

The rejections invoke part of the ICANN bylaws that now requires the GNSO Council to convene and either affirm or amend its recommendations before discussing them with the board. Presumably this could happen at ICANN 78 next month.

The bylaws process essentially gives the board the ultimately authority to throw out the GNSO recommendations if it can muster up a two-thirds supermajority vote, something it rarely has a problem achieving.

Next round of gTLDs could come much sooner than expected

ICANN’s next new gTLDs application round may be closer than we thought, after a policy working group dramatically reduced the timetable for completing its work.

The Internationalized Domain Names Expedited Policy Development Process team has managed to shave a whopping 13 months off its schedule, potentially leading to a similar period being shaved off the runway to the next application window.

The IDNs EPDP had expected to deliver its final deliverables — policy recommendations on how IDNs are handled in gTLD applications — in November 2025, meaning the earliest they could be adopted by the ICANN board would be March 2026.

Because the IDNs policy is seen as a critical gating factor to the next round commencing, the date ICANN penciled in for the next application window was May 2026.

But now the IDNs EPDP group has revised its deadline down to October 2024, member Donna Austin told the GNSO Council last Thursday. This could mean the board could approve its work in early 2025.

The new target means that IDNs are no longer the biggest delaying factor on the critical path to the next window — that honor now falls on the “closed generics” problem, which a “small team” of the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee have been working on in private all year.

The latest thinking on closed generics is that another EPDP would be formed with an estimated run-time of 96 weeks (22 months) — a mid-2025 end date, in other words.

But there are even question marks over that optimal timeline now, following a less than supportive informal public comment period that closed last week. The closed generics small team has apparently taken a week off to ask itself some fundamental questions.

One possibility that has been suggested to speed things up is to take closed generics out of the critical path by retaining the current de facto ban for the next round.

If that were to happen, we could be looking at an application window in 2025.

But nobody ever won money betting on ICANN hitting deadlines, so take this speculation with a pinch of salt big enough to give an elephant hypertension.

Governments call for ban on gTLD auctions

Governments are calling for a ban on new gTLD contention sets being settled via private auctions, a practice that allowed many tens of millions of dollars to change hands in the last application round.

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee said in its ICANN 77 communique that it formally advises ICANN: “To ban or strongly disincentivize private monetary means of resolution of contention sets, including private auctions.”

Private auctions typically see the losers split the winner’s winning bid among themselves. The GAC endorsed the At-Large Advisory Committee’s recommendation that applicants should be forced to ICANN-run “last resort” auctions, where ICANN gets all the money, instead.

The concern is that companies with no intention of actually operating a gTLD will file applications purely in order to have a tradeable asset that can be sold to competing applicants for a huge profit.

In the 2012 round, 224 contention sets were settled in private, often via auctions. ICANN not only allowed but encouraged the practice.

For example, publicly listed portfolio registry Minds + Machines disclosed tens of millions of income from losing private auctions, some of which was reinvested into winning auctions for gTLDs that it did intend to run.

Another applicant, Nu Do Co, did not win a single auction it was involved in, with the exception of the ICANN-run “last resort” auction for .web, where its winning $135 million bid was secretly funded by Verisign.

In the case of .web, rival bidders urged NDC to go to private auction until almost the last moment, eager to get a piece of the winning bid. It remains the subject of legal disputes to this day.

The current GNSO “SubPro” policy recommendations do not include a ban on private settlements, instead saying that applicants should affirm that they have a “bona fide” intent to operate the TLD, under penalty of unspecified sanctions if they lie.

The recommendations include a set of suggested red flags that ICANN should look out for when trying to determine whether an applicant is game the system, such as the number of applications filed versus contention sets won.

It’s pretty vague — the kind of thing that would have to be ironed out during implementation — and the ICANN board of directors has yet to formally approve these specific recommendations.

The GAC’s latest advice also has concerns about the “last resort” auctions that ICANN conducts, which see ICANN place the winning bid in a special fund, particular with regards non-commercial applicants.

The GAC advised ICANN: “To take steps to avoid the use of auctions of last resort in contentions between commercial and non-commercial applications; alternative means for the resolution of such contention sets, such as drawing lots, may be explored.”

Some previous ways to mitigate contention gaming include Vickrey auctions, where every applicant submits a high bid at the time of application and the applicant with the highest bid pays ICANN the amount of the second-highest bid.

Bidding before one even knows whether the gTLD string will be subject to contention is seen as a way to dissuade applicants from applying for strings they don’t really want.

ICANN directors said repeatedly at ICANN 77 last week that the Org will be hiring an auctions expert to investigate the best way to handle auctions and reduce gaming.

ICANN just put a date on the next new gTLD round

ICANN has just penciled in a date for the next round of new gTLD applications for the first time, but it’s already upsetting some people who think it’s not aggressive enough.

Org has released its draft Implementation Plan for the next round, which would see it launch in May 2026, three years from now.

The date seems to have been set from the top. The plan refers to “the Board’s desire to launch the next round by May 2026”.

The plan sets out the timeline by which community members will work with staff to turn the community’s policy recommendations into the rules and procedures for accepting and processing gTLD applications.

This cross-community Implementation Review Team will write the next Applicant Guidebook — the new gTLD’s program’s Holy Quran.

The plan covers the 98 policy recommendations already approved by the ICANN board of directors, it will be updated when or if the board approves the 38 recommendations currently considered “pending”.

The work would be split into eight “modules”, corresponding to the sections of the AGB, and the IRT would tackle each in turn, meeting mostly via Zoom for a couple hours once a week.

The modules would be split into about 40 topics, each covering a group of related recommendations, and each topic would be discussed for two meetings, with Org-drafted text undergoing first and second “readings” by the IRT.

The first module would take seven months to complete, timed from this month, and each subsequent module would take three to four months after the completion of the preceding module, according to the draft plan.

Above and beyond that timetable, the IRT has certain external dependencies, such as the work being done with governments on the “closed generics” issue, the plan notes.

After the AGB is published, ICANN would need to carry out other work, such as subjecting the AGB to public comment, then marketing the program for four months, before an application window would open.

The timeline has been received negatively by pretty much everyone on the IRT expressing a view on mailing list or Zoom chatter so far, with some asking why the modules have to be tackled sequentially rather than in parallel work tracks.

Some have also pointed out that an IRT lasting over two years risks participant attrition, a frequent problem with ICANN’s interminable policy-making work.

The IRT comprises dozens of volunteers from all sections of the community, though the most-engaged tend to be the lawyers and consultants who stand to make money advising large enterprises on their dot-brand applications.

Progress made on next new gTLD round rules

Pace towards finalizing the details of the next new gTLD application round is picking up, with a group of policy-makers close to overcoming some of the ICANN board’s concerns about the program.

A so-called “small team” of GNSO members, aided by a couple of ICANN directors, have drafted a set of recommendations aimed at helping the board approve the 38 community recommendations it has not yet adopted.

The board approved 98 new gTLD “Subsequent Procedures” policy recommendations in March, but was hesitant on issues such as the proposed registry back-end evaluation program, round-based applications, and content policing.

The board had raised the specter of a first-come, first-served model for new gTLD applications, something the community roundly rejected during the Policy Development Process for the next rounds.

Directors in the small group have since clarified that they’re really looking for a “steady state” application process, that may or may not involve FCFS, in order to make planning, hiring and software development more predictable.

There seems to be no question of the next application opportunity being anything other than a round-based process.

Nevertheless, it’s now possible that the GNSO may throw the board a bone by suggesting a PDP that would look into how the new gTLD program could operate in a “steady state” over the long term.

Content policing is another issue that has caused the board pause.

SubPro and the GNSO have recommended that registries be able to add Registry Voluntary Commitments — promises to ban certain types of content from their zone, for example — to their ICANN contracts.

But the board is worried that this may break its 2016 bylaws, which demand ICANN not get involved in content policing, even though the similar Public Interest Commitments from the 2012 round are enforceable.

The GNSO and board currently seem to be leaning towards a bylaws amendment to address RVCs, but it will be a bit of a tightrope, language-wise, to keep ICANN on its ostensibly technical mandate.

The small group has met nine times since late March to try and resolve these and other board concerns ahead of the mid-year ICANN 77 meeting in Washington DC, which starts June 12.

There’s a pretty aggressive schedule of meetings between now and then, with a bilateral between GNSO and board May 22. The board should have the GNSO’s response to its roadblocks by DC, which should allow it to start chipping away at some of the 38 unadopted recommendations.

New gTLDs — implementation talks to start next month

ICANN expects to kick off its implementation efforts for the next rounds of new gTLDs next month.

The Org is putting together its Implementation Review Team, a group of community members that will help shepherd staff into turning policy into reality.

Each supporting organization, advisory committee and constituency will get to nominate a representative (and an alt) and ICANN will put out an open call for volunteers for the team.

Members of the working group that came up with the policy recommendations in the first place are expected to be likely candidates.

The IRT’s main objective is to make sure that ICANN sticks to the letter and spirit of the recommendations, many of which were adopted by its board of directors last month, and prevent members re-litigating settled disputes.

ICANN expects to hold its first IRT meeting the week of May 14 or sooner.

ICANN spent millions of dollars and most of 2022 carrying out an Operational Design Assessment of new gTLDs policy recommendations, which was intended in part to relieve the IRT of some heavy lifting and speed it up.

Brands want new gTLD fast track

The Brand Registry Group is to propose a set of principles for the next round of ICANN’s new gTLD program that it thinks would see the initial application fee slashed by more than half and some evaluations starting as early as this October.

Under the proposals, TLD-curious applicants could get into the system for as little as $100,000 per string, about $150,000 lower than ICANN’s current estimate, and could see ICANN accepting applications as early as April 2025.

The recommendations, drafted by GoDaddy’s Tony Kirsch and Pharos Global’s Michael Palage, will be presented at a session on Saturday, the first day of ICANN’s 76th public meeting, in Cancun, Mexico.

They’re calling the proposals “Option 2a”, a reference to the two options laid out in ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment of the next round, which was completed in December.

The plan would allow applicants to pay $100,000 to submit a bare-bones application and test the waters in terms of contention, objections and similarity. They could then choose to withdraw before submitting the financial and technical portions of their bid.

Applicants with straightforward applications (presumably including most dot-brands) would have a lower overall cost than those who need additional reviews, contention resolution and objection processing.

The paper also criticizes the “astonishing” estimate of a $400 million program development cost, suggesting instead that ICANN repurpose its existing tools such as Salesforce to roll out the application submission system.

It reckons ICANN could start its Registry Service Provider Pre-Evaluation Program, based on the process it already uses when registries switch back-ends, in October this year.

If ICANN adopts the proposals, the BRG reckons a final Applicant Guidebook could be approved in October 2024, with applications accepted from April 2025.

This is why ICANN is worried about new gTLDs right now

ICANN’s board of directors yesterday laid out a whole bucket list of concerns it has about the next round of new gTLDs, some of which it thinks might take over a year to resolve.

The board told the GNSO Council on a conference call that it has 38 areas of concern that will need to be addressed before it can fully approve the policy recommendations sent to it two years ago.

ICANN has identified 298 recommendations emerging from the GNSO’s Final Report (pdf) into the future of the new gTLD program.

The board intends to fully approve 94 of those recommendations March 16, at its meeting in Cancun, which begins next week. A further 168 are believed to be covered by already-approved policy and will simply be “acknowledged”.

That leaves 38 that will need further discussion between the board, Council and Governmental Advisory Committee, covering areas such as legal and financial exposure, potential bylaws violations, and worries about gaming.

Here’s my non-exhaustive hot take on the issues that look most interesting to me.

First-come, first-served

Most surprising to me are indications that the current board appears to favor a gradual transition to making new gTLDs available to applicants on a first-come, first-served basis.

The GNSO’s Final Report was firm that the program continue to operate in discrete, regular rounds, with finite application windows. It rejected the idea of FCFS for a host of persuasive reasons.

But director Becky Burr told the Council yesterday: “The Board really would like to consider whether it makes sense to move to a system of continuous applications at some point.”

“In other words, moving out of rounds into a first-come first-served mode at some point, because that would have a lot of potential advantages with respect to string similarity issues and contention sets and the like,” she said.

FCFS could remove these costly aspects of the program — no contention sets means no auctions, for a start — but do we really want a process where the fastest trigger-finger is the sole decider of who gets a gTLD?

This would make obtaining a gTLD more akin to drop-catching. Anyone remember digital archery?

The board suggests the GNSO reconvene its Policy Development Process working group to address this issue, with a target date of June this year for resolution.

Emojis

The board is also worried that the Final Report suggests a blanket ban on emojis “at any level” in gTLDs, for security and stability reasons — since there’s no standard for how emojis are rendered in software, the chance of confusion is pretty high.

This appears to be an easily fixable problem of wording. The board points out that it only has power to set policy for gTLDs and second-level domains, a ban “at any level” — which would include [emoji].example.example domains — may be ultra vires.

Simply clarifying that the ban only applies at any “registerable” level may be enough to put this concern to bed, but the board reckons it might take until October.

The Content Police

As previously reported, the board has concerns about proposals for “Registry Voluntary Commitments”, which would be contractually enforceable promises to only allow, for example, certain types of content or registrant.

This could go against ICANN’s bylaws commitments to stay out of policing internet content, a very sensitive issue.

ICANN has previously floated the idea of amending the bylaws to enable RVCs, but now the board wants to talk further with the GNSO before taking any action. It thinks it could take until April 2024, 13 months from now, to sort this out.

Watching the Pennies

The board has a number of concerns that some GNSO recommendations may risk emptying ICANN’s coffers.

It wants to revisit the idea that the Applicant Support program be expanded to include lawyers fees and application-writing services, for example. In 2012, it only subsidized ICANN’s own application fees.

The board is also worried that releasing dot-brand owners from the required to post a financial bond to cover the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator’s costs should the TLD fail may end up costing ICANN money.

The Future

The good news arising from yesterday’s briefing appears to be that the board is set on approving the continuation of the new gTLD program in less than two weeks.

The bad news is that there are a few dozen recommendations, grouped into 16 buckets, that it thinks need more work before they can be approved. It thinks these issues can be wrapped up by April 2024, however.

ICANN to approve next new gTLD round next month (kinda)

ICANN’s board of directors is sending mixed signals about the new gTLD program, but it seems it is ready to start approving the next round when the community meets for its 76th public meeting in Mexico next month.

It seems the board will approve the GNSO’s policy recommendations in a piecemeal fashion. There are some undisclosed sticking points that will have to be approved at a later date.

Chair Tripti Sinha wrote this week that the board “anticipates making incremental decisions leading up to the final decision on opening a new application window for new gTLDs”.

While “many” recommendations will be approved at ICANN 76, the board “will defer a small, but important, subset of the recommendations for future consideration”.

The good news is that the board is erring towards the so-called “Option 2” sketched out in Org’s Operational Design Assessment, which would be much quicker and cheaper than the five-year slog the ODA primarily envisaged.

Sinha wrote:

the Board has asked ICANN Org to provide more detail on the financing of the steps envisioned in the ODA, and to develop a variation of the proposed Option 2 that ensures adequate time and resources to reduce the need for manual processing and takes into account the need to resolve critical policy issues, such as closed generics.

The closed generics issue — where companies can keep all the domains in a generic-term gTLD all to themselves — did not have a community consensus recommendation, and the GNSO Council and Governmental Advisory Committee have been holding bilateral talks to resolve the impasse.

There’s been an informal agreement that some closed generics should be allowed, but only if they serve the global public interest.

A recent two-day GAC-GNSO discussion failed to find agreement on what “generic” and “global public interest” actually mean, so the talks could be slow going. The group intends to file an update before ICANN 76.