Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

First new gTLD to fail evaluation revealed

Kevin Murphy, April 12, 2013, 18:32:28 (UTC), Domain Registries

With 132 new gTLD applications in receipt of their Initial Evaluation results, the first to fail has been revealed.
The failed application was for العلیان., an Arabic dot-brand filed by Olayan Investments Company, a 65-year-old privately held Saudi conglomerate.
It failed IE on financial grounds, according to its published results (pdf).
To pass the financial portion of the evaluations, applicants must score a minimum of eight points, scoring at least one point on each of the six questions.
While Olayan did score eight, it scored a zero on question 45, “Demonstration of Financial Capability”, which asks applicants to file audited or unaudited financial statements.
It appears that the applicant in this case did not provide enough information to be evaluated either during the application itself or in response to ICANN’s “clarifying questions”.
The application is now categorized as “Eligible for Extended Evaluation” by ICANN, meaning Olayan can provide extra information in an attempt to pass the failed question.
There’s no fee to do so in this case, but there would be a delay.
ICANN has so far delivered IE results for 132 applications for applications with priority queue numbers up to 149. Every other result to date has been a “pass”.

Tagged: , ,

Comments (9)

  1. Yann F says:

    TLDH must be worried as well. Their DOG and FISHING applications did not pass in the IE round last week

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      网址 (draw #15) and 购物 (draw # 62) from TLDH already passed, so it could be related to change requests.

    • We are not worried. The results are slightly delayed because of a change request. Here is a recent note (April 11, 2013) from ICANN customer service (for .dog):
      Dear Mr. Antony Van Couvering:
      We are writing to inform you that the Initial Evaluation (IE) results for application ID 1-1038-63631 will not be posted during this week’s release of results. Due to the outstanding change request for this application, we will hold the release of IE results until we have finished processing the request. We will notify you once your change request has been processed. If you have any questions about this message, please contact the New gTLD Customer Service Center at (https://gtldapp.icann.org/).
      Sincerely,
      Trang Nguyen
      Director, gTLD Operations ICANN

  2. Yann F says:

    Those two applications have a Neustar backend not TLDH/MM.
    They could have failed on the technical sections since its their own back-end with MM not Neustars

  3. Yann F says:

    The last change request on DOG was 22nd of Feb so this fail has nothing to with outstanding change requests.
    https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applicationstatus/applicationchangehistory/1536

  4. Robert Simon says:

    Either this is something straight forward like adding Keith Teare to the application, which should have been submitted in February and processed by now, or this is something way more complicated.
    Adding Teare in late February when he was named a director would have triggered a similar 30 day comment period to the ones triggered by the loss of directors Landry, Elliott and Dengate Thrush and the one triggered by the addition of Salazar. Even if ICANN took two weeks to process, Teare change comment period would have been completed by now.
    Now any TLDH application will be delayed at least 30 days from when ICANN posts the change notice for Teare, whenever that happens.
    If its not Teare – then it may be something much larger. And if it relates to anything in Q30b – 50 (registry operations or financials) we will never know.

    • Johnson says:

      If i understand you correctly they will be delayed by at least 30 days (maybe more) from ICANN posting since they must add Teare to the applications as he is a director?
      So we will not know if tldh passed until June then.
      The london application have no updates posted either so i guess london and partners will be delayed as well.

Leave a Reply to Robert Simon