Seventh new gTLD bid withdrawn

ICANN has now received seven requests to withdraw new gTLD applications, according to documentation published today.
While we learned today that Google and KSB AG are behind four of the junked bids, the identities of the other three are not yet known.
ICANN has said that it will not reveal the withdrawing applications until all the formalities, such as refunds, have been finalized.
The updated stats came in a slide deck (pdf) set to be used in an ICANN webinar scheduled for noon UTC today.
The slides also reveal the aggregate status of applications’ progress through Initial Evaluation.
As you can see from the slide below, over a quarter of applications have had their String Similarity Review already. Just 65 have had their Geographic Names Review, while 127 and 141 have had their technical and financial evaluations respectively.

ICANN also states that there have been 57 requests for changes to applications — up from 49 at the last count — and that so far nobody has filed a formal objection against any bid.

Google junks three of its new gTLD applications

The identities of the first four new gTLD applications to be withdrawn have been revealed by ICANN.
Google has, as predicted, dropped its bids for .and, .are and .est, because they’re protected three-letter country-codes listed in the ISO 3166 alpha-3 standard.
An application for .ksb, by the KSB, a German maker of “pumps, valves and related liquid transportation systems”, has also been withdrawn, though the reasons are less clear.
KSB is not a protected geographic string, nor has .ksb received any negative public comments. I’m guessing the application was an unnecessary defensive move.
With Google expected to lose 30% of its application fees for the three withdrawn applications ($165,000) I can’t help but wonder why ICANN allowed it to apply for the strings in the first place.
The ban on ISO 3166 alpha-3 codes in the Applicant Guidebook appears to be hard and non-negotiable. The strings essentially enjoy the same degree of exact-match protection as Reserved Names such as .iana and .example.
However, while the TLD Application System was hard-coded to reject attempts to apply for Reserved Names, banned geographic strings did not get the same safeguards.
There’s one other application for an ISO 3166 alpha-3 string — .idn — which does not appear to have been withdrawn yet.
There are at least 16 other applications for protected geographic words that may require government support — but are not outright prohibited — according to our DI PRO study.
According to ICANN, six applications have been withdrawn to date. The change in status only shows up on ICANN’s web site after the refunds have been processed, however.
Google, which applied as Charleston Road Registry, has 98 new gTLD applications remaining.

TLDH wants to unmask mystery gTLD commenter

Portfolio new gTLD applicant Top Level Domain Holdings has responded to the dozens of claims of financial irregularity being submitted to ICANN by a mystery commenter.
The company told DI tonight that the allegations “may be legally actionable” and that it will ask ICANN to remove the comments and ask it to provide identifying information about the commenter.
As I blogged earlier, someone identifying themselves as Alexander Drummond-Willoughby — which some suspect to be a pseudonym — has filed 82 virtually identical comments about TLDH applications.
Today, he started filing the same comments on applications belonging to TLDH clients.
Here’s what TLDH had to say:

TLDH / Minds + Machines is disappointed that ICANN is allowing individuals hiding behind fictional identities to make accusations against us and our clients that are baseless and may be legally actionable. TLDH, as a company listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, is closely overseen by our Nominated Advisor, Beaumont Cornish, a firm licensed by the LSE to monitor our compliance with Exchange rules and applicable laws. The incoherent insinuations coming from these shadowy commenters are without merit and any charges that we have engaged in illegal or unethical activity are completely untrue. TLDH reserves all its rights and will ask ICANN to remove the comments and provide us with appropriate identifying information of these posters.

Drummond-Willoughby is quite an unusual surname with an aristocratic pedigree, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that that he is fictional, just an absence of evidence — such as a disclosed affiliation or any search engine results for his name — that he is real.

Mystery commenter targets M+M new gTLD clients

Having filed dozens of comments criticizing Top Level Domain Holdings’ financial acumen, someone calling himself Alexander Drummond-Willoughby has turned his attention to the company’s new gTLD clients.
Drummond-Willoughby has filed 82 comments with ICANN, until today all of them targeting TLDH’s own gTLD applications and all of them alleging some kind of unspecified financial irregularity.
But today he’s filed exactly the same allegations against applicants, such as BRS Media and the Fédération Internationale de Basketball, that have selected TLDH subsidiary Minds + Machines as their back-end registry services provider.
It’s a barely coherent argument, but the rub of it appears to be that TLDH has made a few bad financial bets, such as investing £180,000 in a potential .nyc applicant that failed to secure the support of New York City.
The source for Drummond-Willoughby’s information appears to be TLDH’s own regulatory filings — the company is listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market — and not exactly secret.
Drummond-Willoughby, for somebody who’s clued-in enough to know about the new gTLD program, has done a remarkably good job of keeping his name out of Google’s index and other search engines, leading to suspicions that it’s a pseudonym.
Here’s his comment on the FIBA bid for .basketball.
UPDATE: TLDH has provided the following statement:

TLDH / Minds + Machines is disappointed that ICANN is allowing individuals hiding behind fictional identities to make accusations against us and our clients that are baseless and may be legally actionable. TLDH, as a company listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, is closely overseen by our Nominated Advisor, Beaumont Cornish, a firm licensed by the LSE to monitor our compliance with Exchange rules and applicable laws. The incoherent insinuations coming from these shadowy commenters are without merit and any charges that we have engaged in illegal or unethical activity are completely untrue. TLDH reserves all its rights and will ask ICANN to remove the comments and provide us with appropriate identifying information of these posters.

Why .com still doesn’t have a thick Whois

ICANN’s board of directors quizzed staff about the lack of a “thick” Whois obligation in Verisign’s .com contract, according to meeting minutes released last night.
The vote was 11-0 in favor, with four abstentions, when the board controversially approved the deal during the Prague meeting in June.
Director George Sadowsky raised the thick Whois issue, which has been a sharp wedge issue between non-commercial users and the intellectual property lobby, according to the minutes.
Senior vice president Kurt Pritz responded:

Kurt noted that while a requirement for a “thick” registry had been a topic of conversation among ICANN and Verisign, the ongoing GNSO Policy Development Process initiated on this same issue rendered this topic somewhat ill-suited for two-party negotiations. In addition, the current .COM registrants entered registration agreements with the understanding of .COM as thin registry, and the resultant change – along with the ongoing policy work – weighed in favor of leaving this issue to policy discussions.

In other words: thick Whois is best left to community policy-making.
Thick Whois is wanted by trademark holders because it will make it easier to enforce data accuracy rules down the road, while non-commercial stakeholders oppose it on privacy grounds.
Domainers, at least those represented by the Internet Commerce Association, have no objection to thick Whois in principle, but believe the policy should go through the GNSO process first.
Verisign is publicly neutral on the matter.
The ICANN board vote on .com was considered somewhat controversial in Prague because it took place before any substantial face-to-face community discussion on these issues.
Sadowsky abstained, stating: “I feel very uncomfortable going forward with provisions that will tie our hands, I think, in the long run without an attempt to reach an accommodation at this time.”
Three other directors (Tonkin, De La Chapelle and Vasquez) abstained from the vote due to actual or the potential for perceived conflicts of interest.
The .com agreement is currently in the hands of the US Department of Commerce which, uniquely for a gTLD, has approval rights over the contract. It’s expected to be renewed before the end of November.

ICM hires Fausett to help with YouPorn antitrust case

ICM Registry has hired new lawyers to help it fend off the antitrust lawsuit filed against it by YouPorn owner Manwin Licensing.
Gordon & Rees senior partner Richard Sybert is taking over as lead counsel in the case, which relates to the launch of .xxx last year.
Notably, the new team includes long-time ICANN legal expert Bret Fausett of Internet.Pro, who represented the Coalition For ICANN Transparency in its antitrust case against ICANN and Verisign.
That’s a bit of a coup for ICM. Manwin’s recent legal arguments have relied heavily on the antitrust precedents Fausett helped set in the CFIT case.
Gordon & Rees replaces Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr as ICM’s outside counsel, due to the recent departure of Wilmerhale’s ICANN guru and ICM defender, Becky Burr.
Burr joined Neustar as its chief privacy officer in May.
Manwin sued ICM and ICANN last October, arguing that the launch of .xxx was little more than a shake-down.
Earlier this month, a California District Court judge ruled that ICANN is not immune from competition law and that the litigation can proceed.
The case will turn in part on the question of whether there’s a market for “defensive registrations” under competition law and whether ICANN and ICM illegally exploited it.

Half of registrars “not sure” about new gTLDs – survey

About half of domain name registrars are still not sold on the idea of new generic top-level domains, according to the results of a small Nic.at report.
The Austrian ccTLD registry commissioned a survey of 220 Austrian companies, 32 .at registrars and 32 creative agencies about the possible impact of new gTLDs.
Nic.at said:

Overall, the industry is approaching the topic of the incoming top level domains with muted enthusiasm: at present around half of registrars are not sure whether they are going to offer their customers the new extensions.

A quarter of the surveyed marketing agencies reckoned internet users will take to new gTLDs, but only 12% of registrars were as confident, according to the report.
The agencies seemed to be more interested in domains than social media, however. Only 12% said that their social media focus made them unaware of the gTLD expansion.
Read the full report in PDF format here.
As well as managing .at, Nic.at is acting as the named registry back-end for 12 new gTLD applications, mostly German.

Fight breaks out over .kiwi

New Zealand country-code manager InternetNZ has approved the creation of .kiwi.nz, setting the stage for a battle over the proposed new gTLD .kiwi.
InternetNZ announced the new second-level domain today. It’s designed to “increase choice” for New Zealanders who want to register their personal names as domain names.
But it stands to clash with .kiwi, a new gTLD applied for by Dot Kiwi Ltd, a New Zealand subsidiary of a Canadian company, which has partnered with Minds + Machines on the bid.
Dot Kiwi, which had objected to the .kiwi.nz domain, has branded InternetNZ’s move “dissappointing and lacking in common sense”, and suggested it is an attempt to capitalize on .kiwi’s advertising.
The applicant said in a statement:

Our opposition to InternetNZ’s confusing introduction of .kiwi.nzis well documented in repeated submissions we have made to them. Those submissions have been ignored. There will now be widespread confusion with the .kiwi.nz domain and the well-advertised forthcoming launch of the .kiwi domain.

But InternetNZ president Frank March said in a press release that the policy used to approve .kiwi.nz does not consider the possibility of confusion with proposed new gTLDs:

The policy for evaluating a new second-level domain takes into account existing second-level domains in .nz but not possible future changes, such as direct registration under .nz (which is currently being consulted on) or new generic Top Level Domains that may or may not be introduced at some point in the future.

The creation of the new second-level domain does not appear to give InternetNZ leverage to object to .kiwi, under a strict reading of the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
For ccTLDs to file a String Confusion Objection against a new gTLD application, they must assert confusion with the TLD; the objection does not appear to cover 2LDs.
To date, there has been only one public comment filed with ICANN about .kiwi on confusion grounds.
Kiwis will get an opportunity to vote with their wallets, it seems.
Registrations under .kiwi.nz are expected to open September 11, but under InternetNZ policy .kiwi.nz will not actually go live until a minimum threshold of 500 domains has been passed, the company said.

KSRegistry to provide back-end for three ccTLDs

KSRegistry, the registry services arm of Key-Systems, has won deals to provide the back-end infrastructure for .gd, .tc and .vg.
The three Caribbean island nations — Grenada, Turks and Caicos Islands and British Virgin Islands — have used London-based AdamsNames for their registries for many years.
AdamsNames is now outsourcing the gigs to KSRegistry, according to a press release.
The transition means that the three ccTLDs will move to a standard EPP interface and dump its XML-RPC one, making it easier for registrars to start selling the names.
The .tc space is currently closed to new registrations, however. AdamsNames said it plans to relaunch the ccTLD in October following a marketing campaign.
KSRegistry, which is the named back-end provider for 27 new gTLD applications, also recently took over technical services for .dm, the Dominican ccTLD.

New gTLD hopefuls set aggressive targets for ICANN

ICANN should start delegating new gTLDs in the first quarter of next year as previously planned and the Governmental Advisory Committee should work faster.
That’s according to many new gTLD applicants dropping their ideas into ICANN’s apparently semi-official comment box on application “metering” over the last week or so.
ICANN wanted to know how it should queue up applications for eventual delegation, in the wake of the death of batching and digital archery.
According to information released over the past couple of weeks, it currently plans to release the results of Initial Evaluation on all 1,924 still-active applications around June or July next year, leading to the first new gTLDs going live in perhaps August.
But that’s not good enough for many applicants. Having successfully killed off batching, their goal now is to compress the single remaining batch into as short a span as possible.
The New TLD Applicant Group, a new observer group recognized by ICANN’s Registry Stakeholder Group, submitted lengthy comments.
NTAG wants Initial Evaluation on all applications done by January 2013, and for ICANN to publish the results as they trickle in rather than in one batch at the end.
The suggested deadline is based on ICANN’s recent statement that its evaluators’ processing powers could eventually ramp up to 300 applications per month. NTAG said in its comments:

Notwithstanding ICANN’s statements to the contrary, there is not a consensus within the group that initial evaluation results should be held back until all evaluations are complete; in fact, many applicants believe that initial evaluation results should be released as they become available.

That view is not universally supported. Brand-centric consultancy Fairwinds and a couple of its clients submitted comments expressing support for the publication of all Initial Evaluation results at once.
January 2013 is an extremely aggressive deadline.
Under the batching-based schedule laid out in the Applicant Guidebook, 1,924 applications would take more like 20 months, not seven, to pass through Initial Evaluation.
NTAG could not find consensus on methods for sequencing applications among its members. Separate submissions from big portfolio applicants including Donuts, Uniregistry, TLDH and Google and smaller, single-bid applicants gave some ideas, however.
Donuts, for example, hasn’t given up on a game-based solution to the sequencing problem – including, really, Rock Paper Scissors – though it seems to favor a system based on timestamping.
The company is among a few to suggest that applications could be prioritized using the least-significant digits of the timestamp they received when they were submitted to ICANN.
An application filed at 15:01:01 would therefore beat an application submitted at 14:02:02, for example.
This idea has been out there for a while, though little discussed. I have to wonder if any applicants timed their submissions accordingly, just in case.
Comments submitted by TLDH, Google and others offer a selection of methods for sequencing bids which includes timestamping as well alphabetical sorting based on the hash value of the applications.
This proposal also supports a “bucketing” approach that would give more or less equal weight to five different types of application – brand, geographic, portfolio, etc.
Uniregistry, uniquely I think, reckons it’s time to get back to random selection, which ICANN abandoned due to California lottery laws. The company said in its comments:

Random selection of applications for review should not present legal issues now, after the application window has closed. While the window was still open, random selection for batches would have given applicants an incentive to file multiple redundant applications, withdrawing all but the application that placed earliest in the random queue and creating a kind of lottery for early slots. Now that no one can file an additional application, that lottery problem is gone.

Given that the comment was drafted by a California lawyer, I can’t help but wonder whether Uniregistry might be onto something.
Many applicants are also asking the GAC to pull its socks up and work on its objections faster.
The GAC currently thinks it can file its official GAC Advice on New gTLDs in about April next year, which doesn’t fit nicely with the January 2013 evaluation deadline some are now demanding.
ICANN should urge the GAC to hold a special inter-sessional meeting to square away its objections some time between Toronto in October and Beijing in April, some commenters say.
ICANN received dozens of responses to its call for comments, and this post only touches on a few themes. A more comprehensive review will be posted on DI PRO tomorrow.