Mistake blamed for “Germans only” .voting policy
It seems the new gTLD .voting will not be restricted to Germans after all.
We reported earlier today that .voting registry Valuetainment had submitted a registration policy that required all registrants to have a presence in Germany.
The language used in the policy was identical, we later discovered, to that found in the equivalent policy for .ruhr, a German geographic gTLD operated by a different registry.
But Thomas Rickert of the German law firm Schollmeyer & Rickert, which has both .voting and .ruhr registries as clients, just called to let us know that the policy as submitted to ICANN was a mistake.
It seems there will be no local presence requirement for .voting after all.
Valuetainment will be submitting a revised policy to ICANN without the error. The German-language version of the policy does not contain the error, Rickert said.
Rickert said he’d like it to be known that the registry was blameless in this instance.
I guess he’s implying that their consultant or back end registry technical provider is to blame.
On the off chance you’re not being sarcastic, I think he’s saying the lawyers are to blame.