Enjoy your weekend — ICANN extends new gTLD comment period
ICANN has extended the public comment period on new gTLD applications by 45 days, after pressure from intellectual property interests and the US government.
The window to have comments considered by evaluators, which was set to close on Sunday, will now end September 26. ICANN said:
After review and discussion of the community’s input, and careful consideration of the implications and impacts the additional time may have on the processing of applications, we have extended the application comment period an additional 45 days.
That’s in line with what the Intellectual Property Constituency asked for last week, but rather less than the Association of National Advertisers wanted.
To date, over 5,500 comments have been filed, but about half of those can be attributed to the same five or six brands, most of which are using the same consultant-prepared language in their filings.
The most immediate consequence of the change today, I expect, is that all the predictably last-minute commenters in the ICANN community get to enjoy their weekends instead.
And I checked: September 26 is a Wednesday.
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This gives you more time to object to the closed Google .blog application 😉
No need for that. Pritz has confirmed that the IO can take his lead from any published objection. There’s been a few of those already on .blog, iirc.
It will be nice to have a blog post being referred by the IO as published objection for .blog.