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Second-shot gTLD bid rules revealed

Kevin Murphy, October 18, 2024, 13:36:27 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN has published the first, early draft of rules for new gTLD applicants that want to change their applied-for strings at the thirteenth hour.

In a shock move last month, ICANN’s board of directors said that applicants would be able to nominate a second-choice gTLD, as a means to reduce the number of contention sets and potentially increase the number of approved TLDs.

The decision, which has yet to be formally approved by the board, arguably raised more questions than it answered, and has been criticized for being a top-down imposition and introducing much more complexity into the application process.

But the poor Org staffers tasked with turning the idea into reality have now published a first draft of the proposed rules, which could eventually make it into the final Applicant Guidebook, that may answer some of those questions.

But I’m not convinced the idea has been sufficiently thought through yet. Here’s my take.

There’s going to be two Reveal Days

In 2012, Reveal Day was the day ICANN published the applicant names and applied-for strings of all 1,930 new gTLD applications. It was a simple one-time info dump, letting all applicants know who they were competing against.

As host of a Reveal Day panel discussion, I’d been given a hard copy of the spreadsheet in advance and virtually had to fight off applicants wanting a sneak peek with a dirty stick, despite the reveal being mere minutes away.

This time around, giving applicants the option of a pre-selected back-up string complicates matters, so there would be two reveals: Preliminary Reveal Day and Final Reveal Day.

On Preliminary Reveal Day, ICANN would publish the list of applicants along with their primary and secondary desired strings. Applicants would instantly know whether they were in contention, and get a rough idea of of what their second-chance options were.

They would then have a Replacement Period, currently penciled in at [14 days] to decide whether to stick to their first choice or switch their entire application over to their back-up.

If you’re a tiny podcast aggregator who suddenly finds your .podcasts application facing a contention resolution auction against Amazon, Spotify and Joe Rogan, you might want to switch to .knittingpodcasts or something.

Pick a crappy string

I present the example of .knittingpodcasts only half jokingly — the way the rules are currently drafted appears to actively encourage the selection of crappy back-up strings.

ICANN staffers told community members at two implementation meetings this month that applicants should pick second-choice strings “unlikely to be picked up by somebody else as their alternate”.

The whole point of allowing replacement strings is to reduce the number of contention sets. Applicants will not be allowed to switch to a string that is another applicant’s primary or secondary string. The draft text reads:

Applicants must be aware that they will be prevented from using their replacement string in cases where a designated replacement string is identical to another replacement string or applied-for primary string, as this would increase the risk of new instances of contention being created or existing instances being increased.

So, unless you’re hoping to get very lucky indeed, you’d be mad to apply for .crypto and nominate .blockchain as your back-up, as you’d be prevented from switching to your second-choice, which is very likely to be already contested.

Your best chance of avoiding contention would be to pick a string just crappy enough that nobody else is likely to apply for it, but not crappy enough that it doesn’t make business sense to apply for.

Avoid plurals, dummy

It now seems incredibly likely that ICANN is going to ban single/plural equivalents from coexisting, so choosing the plural of your primary string as your back-up (or vice-versa) would probably be an exercise in futility.

If the ban is approved, plural/singular matches will be placed in the same contention set anyway, so picking .podcasts as your alternate for .podcast will in most cases not avoid contention. There are some edge cases here, which I’ll get to below.

There’s no going back

Once you’ve opted to switch to your secondary string, you can’t later change your mind and switch back, even if all your original competitors have dropped out of the race and you’d have a free run at your primary.

The draft rules currently state: “Applicants who opt for their replacement string will be unable to revert to their original primary string at any stage during the program.”

They later state: “Applicants should note that if all applicants for a given string opt for their respective replacement strings, it is possible that there may be no remaining active application for the primary applied-for string.”

War-gaming undesirable consequences

I think we can all agree that .podcast is a more desirable gTLD than .podcasts.

Spotify says there are something like six million podcasts in its library. Selling a .podcast domain to a fraction of those podcasters could be a very lucrative business and provide millions of registrants with cool domains.

But how many entities would feel a .podcasts domain is more appropriate for their businesses? A handful of podcast aggregators, maybe? Certainly a substantially smaller number. The .podcasts registry would have to sell at a huge premium price to make up for the loss of volume.

So, let’s say Company A and Company B both apply for .podcast as their primary string. Company A selects .knittingpodcast as its back-up, while Company B selects .fishingpodcast.

After Preliminary Reveal Day, both applicants become afraid that their rival is better-funded and more committed to their application, so to avoid an auction decide to switch to their secondary string.

Remember, ICANN is bent on banning private resolution of contention sets, and while language has yet to be published or finalized, the current thinking is that private resolution would also be banned during the Replacement Period. The rules might even go so far as to ban non-monetary resolution, or communication between competing applicants.

So Company A and Company B, both fearful of the other’s financial clout, switch to their back-ups and a year or two down the line the internet has a .fishingpodcast gTLD and a .knittingpodcast gTLD, but no .podcast gTLD.

Let’s say instead that Company B ignored ICANN advice and named the plural .podcasts as its back-up, and both applicants switched. Now, not only would the more desirable singular .podcast not get delegated, but the single/plural ban would mean it would never be delegated.

Is that a desirable outcome? Populating the DNS with second-choice gTLDs nobody wants? (.com fanboys feel free to leave a comment below).

I can’t help but feel that a lot of this stuff is going to need much more intensive war-gaming, possibly involving top psychologists and game theorists, before the rules are finalized and approved.


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