Recent Posts
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- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
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- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
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- ICANN picks the domain it will never, ever release
- ICANN approves domain takedown rules
- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
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- ICANN threatens to regulate your speech [RANT]
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- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
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- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
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- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
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- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
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- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
African Union can’t register .africa domain
File this one under “ironic”. Also file it under “Maarten Botterman might be the worst pen-pal in history.”
It turns out that the African Union has been unable to register its domain of choice in the .africa gTLD — for which AU support was a crucial and divisive deal-breaker — because of rules insisted upon by governments.
The AU Commission’s vice chair, Kwesi Quartey, has asked ICANN to release the string “au” from the list that all contracted registries have to agree to reserve because they match the names or acronyms of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs).
The AU is an IGO, so its string is protected from being registered by anyone, including itself.
Quartey wrote, in a letter (pdf) to ICANN chair Botterman:
Unfortunately inclusion of the AU label within the IGO List had the unintended consequence of preventing any third party, including the African Union, from registering the acronym as a domain name (au.africa), yet there is an urgent need to change the African Union digital identifier on the internet from au.int to the .africa domain name.
“Urgent need”, you say? That’s ICANN’s specialty!
Botterman immediately sprang into action and sent his urgent reply (pdf), waiting just 21 short months from Quartey’s July 2020 urgent request to urgently pass the buck to the Governmental Advisory Committee.
Only the GAC can ask for a protected acronym to be removed from the list, he wrote. ICANN Org and board have their hands tied.
Also, removing “au” from the list will release it in all gTLDs, potentially allowing it to be registered by third parties in hundreds of other zones, so watch out for that, Botterman noted.
An additional wrinkle not noted in the letter, which may help or hinder the AU, is that Australia also has rights to the same string under an entirely different new gTLD program reserved list, because it matches the Aussie ccTLD.
You’ll recall that .africa was a contested gTLD in which AU support was the deciding factor.
The AU had originally offered to support a bid from DotConnectAfrica, but after the new gTLD program got underway it withdrew that support and conducted a registry tender that was won by ZA Central Registry, which now runs .africa.
DCA has been pursuing ICANN about this in arbitration and the courts ever since.
“Unfortunately inclusion of the AU label within the IGO List had the unintended consequence of preventing any third party, including the African Union, from registering the acronym as a domain name (au.africa)”
That was the INTENDED consequence.
You don’t say.