The latest new gTLD passes and signings

Five new gTLD applications passed Extended Evaluation late Friday, while one more contract was signed.
Four of the five EE passes were dot-brands that had previously failed to provide ICANN with enough financial information to pass their Initial Evaluation.
They are: .mckinsey (McKinsey Holdings), .alcon (Alcon Laboratories), .cipriani (Hotel Cipriani), and .jcp (JCP Media).
The fifth was DotHome Ltd (Defender Security/CGR-Ecommerce) with .home, a bittersweet pass given that the .home gTLD is now unlikely to ever see the light of day due to name collision risks.
Also late Friday, another registry signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN. This time, it was Dai Nippon Printing with .dnp, a Japanese dot-brand.
The contract has not yet been published, but it seems unlikely to be ICANN’s newly proposed dot-brand contract, which is still open for public comment.

Blocked trademarks still eligible for Donuts sunrises

Donuts has confirmed that it is to allow trademark owners to participate in its new gTLD Sunrise periods even if their marks appear on name collisions block-lists.
The decision means that companies will be able to choose whether to grab names matching their marks during Sunrise, or take the risk that they will be released at a later date.
Donuts, like all gTLD registries, has been given block-lists for each of its TLDs. The idea is to avoid collisions with names already in use on private name-spaces behind corporate firewalls.
Lots of these blocked names match or contain well-known trademarks.
(Trademark owners can use the DI PRO collisions search engine to figure out which gTLDs have been asked to block their marks.)
While this appears at first glance to be good news for mark owners that just want their marks blocked in as many TLDs as possible, it also poses potential risks.
Blocked names are not likely to be blocked until after the first wave of Sunrise periods are over, and ICANN’s unblocking process has not yet been written.
For a company that wants to register its brand in a new gTLD, but is on a block-list, that could cause problems.
By allowing companies to participate in Sunrise regardless, Donuts is giving them a way to mitigate the risk of somebody else grabbing their brands in future.
Donuts does not plan to allow any of these names to be activated in the DNS until the ICANN collisions mitigation plan has been finalized, however.
So companies could find themselves paying for Sunrise names but unable to use them until some unspecified future date — if at all.

Ten more new gTLDs get ICANN contracts

.bar, .pub, .fish, .actor, .caravan, .saarland, .yokohama, .ren, .eus and .рус all have new gTLD contracts with ICANN as of yesterday.
It’s an eclectic batch of TLDs. Unusually, only one belongs to Donuts.
Of note is .caravan, which on the face of it looks like an English-language generic, but which is actually a closed, single-registrant dot-brand.
While “caravan” is an English dictionary word in the UK and Australasia, in the US it’s a 50-year-old trademark belonging to Illinois-based applicant Caravan International.
The Governmental Advisory Committee never flagged up .caravan as a “closed generic” in its Beijing Communique, so ICANN never questioned how it would be used.
However, the application states that the company plans “to reserve all names within the TLD to itself”.
What we seem to have here is a case of a dictionary word in one part of the world being captured by a single-registrant applicant due to a trademark elsewhere.
Another notable new Registry Agreement signatory is Punto 2012, which has obtained a contract for .bar.
The gTLD was originally contested, but Demand Media’s United TLD withdrew following an RFP held by the government of Montenegro, which had an effective veto over the string “Bar” due to a match with the protected name of one of its administrative regions.
I gather Montenegro will be paid in some way from the .bar registry pot.
There are also a few new geographic/cultural registries this week: .eus for the Basque people of Spain, .yokohama for a Japanese city, .saarland for a German state and the Cyrillic IDN .рус for a subset of the Russian people.
The only .brand is .ren, for the Chinese social network Renren.
The remainder are English-language generics.

GAC kills off two more new gTLD bids

A new gTLD applicant has withdrawn two of its Chinese-language applications after failing to secure the necessary government support.
Guangzhou YU Wei Information Technology Co withdrew its applications for .深圳 (.shenzhen) and .广州 (.guangzhou).
Both are the names of very large cities in southern China.
The ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee had previously issued official Advice against both bids.
The applicant had failed to get a passing score on its Initial Evaluation earlier this year, with ICANN ruling that governmental “support or non-objection was either not provided or did not meet the criteria”.
To get a geographic gTLD, you need to prove local government support, something which the applicant seems to have been unable to provide during Extended Evaluation.
Weirdly, Guangzhou YU Wei has previously passed EE for .佛山 (.foshan) and IE for .广东 (.guangdong), which are both also Chinese geographic names.

German geo .ruhr enters the root

Verisign today delegated the new gTLD .ruhr to the DNS root zone, making it the 35th new gTLD to go live.
It’s a geographic string, meant for residents of the north-west German region of Ruhr, operated by Regiodot.
nic.ruhr is already resolving.
Regiodot is already taking pre-registrations via approximately 10 signed-up registrars, which all appear to operate in German-speaking countries.
The Ruhr (in German, it’s short for Ruhrgebiet) has over eight million inhabitants, according to Wikipedia, making the potential market for .ruhr larger than many European ccTLDs.

ICANN floats new rules for dot-brands

Dot-brand gTLDs could get big exemptions to the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement under new rules published for public comment by ICANN over the weekend.
The proposed changes were negotiated by ICANN and the Brand Registry Group, a coalition of dot-brand applicants that one day plans to become a formal part of ICANN’s policy-making structure.
“The changes will allow trademark owners who have applied for new TLDs to promote and maintain trust in their .Brand registries,” the BRG said in a statement supporting the changes.
Dot-brands would be completely exempt from the standard Code of Conduct, which requires registries to treat all accredited registrars equally.
They’d be explicitly allowed to work with only one trusted registrar.
Given that dot-brands are all essentially single-registrants spaces (limited to the brand owner, its affiliates and trademark licensees) it makes sense to eschew the usual competitive registrar market.
Brand owners were also very worried about ICANN’s right to re-delegate defunct gTLDs, including dot-brands, to new registry operators, which could be seen as extreme brand dilution.
So the proposed RA amendment would also prevent ICANN from redelegating dot-brands for two years after the agreement expires, unless there’s a compelling public-interest reason to do so.
If ICANN chose to redelegate during that period, the former dot-brand would be able to object.
Nothing would stop a third party applying for the vacated gTLD in a subsequent application round.
The changes appear to prevent brand registries from claiming exclusive rights to gTLD strings in perpetuity, while still giving them breathing space to wind down and attempt to avoid brand confusion.
The definition of a “brand” seems to have been written in order to prevent gaming by companies with trademarks on generic strings.
To qualify to become a dot-brand, a registry would have to prove that its gTLD string is a trademark it owns for non-domain industry they’re already playing in. Strings starting with dots would be excluded.
ICANN would determine which gTLDs are eligible, and would be able to revoke the dot-brand status if the registry changed its business plans in future.
The proposal has been negotiated by ICANN legal staff and the BRG and has not yet been approved by the New gTLD Program Committee or the ICANN board.
It’s open for public comment until January 31, here.

Oh no! Cement company withdraws dot-brand bid

FLSmidth, a Danish cement company, has withdrawn its application for the new gTLD .fls.
It’s the first dot-brand to be withdrawn from the program in months.
FLSmidth had passed Initial Evaluation and was not facing any objections or Governmental Advisory Committee advice, so it’s not immediately clear why the company decided to pull out.
The company recently reported a fall in profitability, so perhaps it’s just trying to cut costs by eliminating superfluous expenses.

TLDH ditches .roma bid after GAC trouble

Top Level Domain Holdings has withdrawn its bid for the .roma gTLD, after apparently running afoul of the Italian government.
The gTLD was to represent the city of Rome, but Italy issued the company with an Early Warning (pdf) a year ago saying the company had “No involvement or support from the local authorities” and should withdraw.
TLDH disputed this, saying in November 2012:

In fact the Company had engaged extensively with the relevant local authority and will provide supporting documentation to the Italian GAC member. Once this evidence has been submitted, the Directors believe that the objection will be withdrawn.

The warning did not escalate to full-blown Governmental Advisory Committee advice, but .roma nevertheless failed Initial Evaluation (pdf) due to the lack of documented government support with its application.
The bid was eligible for Extended Evaluation, but it seems that TLDH was unable to get the required level of support or non-objection from Italy to allow the bid to pass.
It’s the second of TLDH’s applications to get killed off by a GAC member. It withdrew its non-geo application for .spa as soon as Belgium started making noises about its own city of Spa.
The company also ditched plans to apply for .mumbai in 2011 due to confusion about whether the city’s government actually supported it or not.

Donuts’ portfolio swells as ICANN signs 31 new gTLD contracts

ICANN signed 31 new gTLD Registry Agreements yesterday, 24 of which were with Donuts subsidiaries.
Back-end registry provider Neustar was among a handful of companies signing RAs for their dot-brands too.
Donuts signed contracts for: .haus, .properties, .maison, .productions, .parts, .cruises, .foundation, .industries, .vacations, .consulting, .report, .villas, .condos, .cards, .vision, .dating, .catering, .cleaning, .community, .rentals, .partners, .events, .flights and .exposed.
Top Level Design signed for .ink, which is expected to compete with Uniregistry’s already-delegated .tattoo.
XYZ.com signed for its uber-generic budget offering .xyz.
BusinessRalliart is now contracted for its Japanese geo .okinawa.
IRI Domain Management, affiliated with the Mormon church, got its .mormon RA, for what is expected to be a “highly restricted” religious namespace.
KRG Department of Information Technology got .krd, which it wants to use to serve the Kurdish people and Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Finally, Italian management consultancy Praxi got its dot-brand .praxi.

Superstitious launch planned for Chinese gTLDs

TLD Registry plans to time its Chinese new gTLD launch dates to coincide with days considered lucky in Chinese astrology.
The Sunrise period for .在线 (“.online”) and .中文网 (“.chinesewebsite”) will start January 17 and end March 17.
According to the registry:

Both the start and end days of Sunrise fall on highly auspicious days for “starting new businesses” in the ancient Chinese almanac. The Chinese almanac was created during the Han Dynasty around 200BC, and continues to be an important guide to the lives and businesses of more than a billion Chinese people.

A landrush period will follow starting March 20, “an auspicious day for ‘breaking ground'”, and ending April 24.
TLD Registry will also run a live/online auction for “the most valuable and sought-after” names in Macau on March 21.
General availability is slated for April 28, “a highly auspicious date for ‘starting new businesses’ and ‘grand openings'”
It’s cute marketing, and no mistake.
The Chinese almanac, like all astrology, is of course utter nonsense.