ICANN begins evaluating new gTLD applications

ICANN has already started formally evaluating some of the 1,930 new generic top-level domain applications it has received, according to sources.
Technical and financial evaluations are believed to have been going on for several days at the three outside firms ICANN has contracted with – Ernst & Young, KPMG and JAS Global Advisors.
ICANN staff said a few times during the Prague meeting last month that July 12 was the kick-off date for evaluations, but I’m led to believe they may have started a little later than that.
Nevertheless, they’re underway.
What’s not yet known is how – or if – the 1,930 applications will be batched into more manageable chunks.
The last official word from ICANN came on June 28, when Cherine Chalaby, chair of the board’s new gTLD program committee, said an update would be provided in about three weeks.
With that admittedly vague deadline now in the past, we can only assume that the publication of a new timetable is imminent.

American government kills off .kids.us

The US government is killing off the failed .kids.us domain, ten years after it was created by Congress.
The decision was explained in a statement posted on www.kids.us:

As a result of the changed landscape of the Internet and the many other tools that parents now have available to them to protect their children’s online experience, effective July 27, 2012, the Department of Commerce suspended the kids.us

An accompanying document (pdf) from Commerce says that .us registry operator Neustar should stop accepting new registrations and ask registrants to suspend their sites.
All .kids.us domains will be removed from the .us zone by June 27, 2013.
The .kids.us space was created by the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002 and essentially forced on Neustar as a means for some politicians to get some family-friendly fluff on their voting records.
It’s been considered an abject failure ever since, largely due to its strict content regulations and a lack of marketing.
From the Google results and the old .kids.us directory, I’d estimate the number of registrations at fewer than 100.
In the new gTLD program there are two applicants for .kids — Amazon and DotKids Foundation. There’s also an applicant for .kid and an applicant for the Russian “.children”.

Vignes out as CEO of OpenRegistry

OpenRegistry’s founding CEO, Jean-Christophe Vignes, left the position to join a Paris-based law firm last month.
He’s now senior counsel for the domain name practice at Caprioli & Associés.
Vignes said the change of jobs came as part of his family’s move to Paris and that he’s still a member of the OpenRegistry board of directors.
OpenRegistry (also known as Sensirius), which was selected as the back-end registry provider for 21 gTLD applications including .deloitte, .kpn and .schwarz, is based in Belgium.
It is believed that Hans Seeuws, Vignes’ former second in command, is now in charge at OpenRegistry.

Christian group opposes .sex, .porn, .adult

Morality In Media, one of the groups that fought the approval of .xxx for years, has launched a letter-writing campaign against the proposed .sex, .porn and .adult top-level domains.
ICANN has received a couple dozen comments of objection to the three gTLDs over the last couple of days, apparently due to this call-to-arms.
Expect more. MIM was one of the main religion-based objectors to .xxx, responsible for crapflooding ICANN with thousands of comments in the years before the gTLD was approved.
Now that .xxx has turned out to be less successful than ICM Registry hoped, MIM feels its key belief on the subject — that porn gTLDs lead to more porn — has been vindicated.
MIM president Patrick Trueman wrote in one of his comments:

During the years of this fight against the .xxx domain, we said many times that the establishment of a .xxx domain would increase, not decrease the spread of pornography on the Internet, causing even more harm to children, families and communities, and make ICANN complicit in that harm.
That prediction has been fulfilled because the porn sites on the .com domain have not vacated the .com and moved to .xxx. Rather, as we have seen, the .xxx has just added thousand of additional porn sites on the Internet and .com porn sites stayed put. ICANN bears responsibility for this. The .xxx was not needed.

For some reason, the complaints are only leveled at the three ICM Registry subsidiaries that are applying for porn-themed gTLDs, and not the other .sex applicant.
Uniregistry’s application for .sexy has not been targeted.
And MIM has apparently not read the applications it is complaining about; its call to action complains about non-porn companies having to pay “protection money” to defensively register in .sex.
However, the three ICM bids explicitly contemplate an extensive grandfathering program under which all current defensive registrations in .xxx would be reserved in .sex, .porn and .adult.

Does this sexy .sx ad portend a clash with .sex?

In the occasional DI tradition of linkbaiting Domaining.com with promises of scantily clad eye candy, I humbly invite male readers to get their goggles around this beauty:

Phwoar! Eh?
Apologies.
Anyway, there’s a serious point here.
SX Registry, which is in the process of launching the new .sx ccTLD for the recently formed territory of Sint Maarten, distributed this flyer in the goody bags at ICANN 44 in Prague last week.
The marketing was aimed at registrars, presumably, but the company’s web site has similar imagery as well.
It’s pretty clear what angle SX Registry is going for, and it could portend a clash with .sex and .sexy, which have both been proposed by applicants under ICANN’s new gTLD program.
ICM Registry (.sex), Uniregistry (.sexy) and Internet Marketing Solutions Limited (.sex) may have a potential objector on their hands.

Verisign’s .name contract up for renewal

Fresh from winning ICANN approval for its money-spinning .com franchise, Verisign is now going through the same process to renew its .name registry agreement.
Notably, the company isn’t getting the ability to raise its prices — the registry fee for a .name domain will still be fixed at $6 per name per year, according to the new contract.
There are lots of other changes, though. Many terms have been changed to make .name more in line with .net, which Verisign renegotiated last year, and with the standard new gTLD contract.
The company will, for example, be able to launch geographically focused promotions, in line with .net, and will be bound by new service level agreements, in line with new gTLDs.
While there are tweaks to the fee structure, the amount of money ICANN will reap from the deal appears to remain at the current rate of $0.25 per transaction or domain-year.
ICANN published the proposed agreement for public comment on Tuesday. They’re cutting it pretty fine — the current deal, signed in 2007, is due to expire on August 15.

.co.no opens for business after court win

The Norwegian registrant of the domain name co.no has won a court case against .no registry Norid that will allow it to finally launch as a pseudo-ccTLD, according to the company.
A Trondheim court ruled that Norid cannot revoke Elineweb’s registration of co.no for alleged policy violations, but has also ruled that the domain cannot be transferred to a third party.
Therefore, Elineweb plans to start offering third-level .co.no domain names to companies and individuals unable to register the names they want under Norid’s strict policy regime.
The company will open .co.no on a first-come, first-served basis — having already conducted sunrise and landrush periods — tomorrow at 10am Central European Time.
The full list of 70+ accredited registrars can be found here.
DI first covered the lawsuit back in October 2011.
The .co.no namespace is managed by CoDNS, a subsidiary of the registrar EuroDNS that already operates .co.nl as a pseudo-ccTLD, in partnership with Elineweb.
The two namespaces are not official ccTLDs, but they are both recognized by the Public Suffix List, which makes them behave similarly in browsers.

Microsoft, Yahoo and others involved in new dot-brand gTLD group

HSBC, Microsoft, Yahoo and jewelry maker Richemont have told ICANN they plan to form a new GNSO stakeholder group just for single-registrant gTLD registries.
The group would comprise dot-brand registries and — potentially — other types of single-user gTLD manager.
A letter (pdf) to ICANN chair Steve Crocker, signed by executives from the four companies, reads in part:

As a completely new type of contracted party, we do not have a home to represent our unique community. In addition, the existence of conflicts with other contracted parties makes it challenging for us to reside within their stakeholder group.

Combined, the companies have applied for about 30 single-registrant gTLDs, mostly corresponding to brands.
Richemont, which is applying for dot-brands including .cartier, is also applying for the keywords .jewelry and .watches as single-user spaces.
The group plans to discuss formalizing itself at the next ICANN meeting, in Toronto this October.
During the just-concluded Prague meeting, the GNSO’s existing registries stakeholder group accepted several new gTLD applicants — I believe mainly conventional registries — into the fold as observers.
How the influx of new gTLD registries will affect the GNSO’s structure was a hot topic for the Governmental Advisory Committee during the meeting too. I guess now it has some of the answers it was looking for.

ICANN gives Verisign’s .com contract the nod

ICANN’s board of directors has approved Verisign’s .com registry agreement for another six years.
In a closed meeting on Saturday, the results of which have just been published, the board decided against making any of the changes that had been suggested by the community.
There had been a small uproar over the fact that Verisign will retain the right to increase its .com registry fee by 7% in four out of the next seven years.
The new contract also rejiggers the fees Verisign pays ICANN to bring them more into line with other registry agreements. As a result, ICANN will net millions more in revenue.
Other parties had also asked for improved rights protection, such as a mandatory Uniform Rapid Suspension system, and for the current restrictions on single-character domain names to be lifted.
But the board decided that “no revisions to the proposed .COM renewal Registry Agreement are necessitated after taking into account the thoughtful and carefully considered comments received.”
The agreement will now be forward to the US government for approval. Unlike most registry contracts, the Department of Commerce has the right to review the .com deal.
The current contract expires November 30.

Most new gTLDs could be closed shops

ICANN’s new generic top-level domain program could create almost 900 closed, single-user namespaces, according to DI PRO’s preliminary analysis.
Surveying all 1,930 new gTLD applications, we’ve found that 912 – about 47% – can be classified as “single registrant” bids, in which the registry would tightly control the second level.
Single-registrant gTLDs are exempt from the Registry Code of Conduct, which obliges registries to offer their strings equally to the full ICANN-accredited registrar channel.
The applications include those for dot-brand strings that match famous trademarks, as well as attempts by applicants such as Amazon and Google to secure generic terms for their own use.
Our definition of “single registrant” includes cases where the applicant has indicated a willingness to lightly share second-level domains with its close affiliates and partners.
It also includes applications such as those for .gov-style zones in non-US jurisdictions, where domains would be available to multiple agencies under the same government umbrella.
But it does not include gTLD applications that would merely require registrants to provide credentials, be a member, or agree to certain restrictions in order to register a domain.
Since there’s been a lot of discussion this last week about whether the single-registrant model adds value to the internet, I thought I’d try to measure the likely scale of the “problem” when it comes to eventual delegation into the DNS root zone.
How many closed registries could we see?
According to the DI PRO database, of the 912 single-registrant applications, 132 are in contention sets. There are 101 contention sets with at least one such applicant.
Some are up against regular multiple-registrant applications (both open and restricted gTLDs), whilst others are only fighting it out with other single-registrant applicants.
Let’s look at a couple of hypothetical scenarios.
Scenario One – Single-Registrant Applicants Win Everything
First, let’s assume that each and every applicant passes their evaluations, does not drop out, and there are no successful objections.
Then let’s imagine that every contention set containing at least one single-registrant bidder is won by one of those single-registrant bidders.
According to my calculations, that would eliminate 31 single-registrant applications and 226 multiple-registrant applications from the pool.
Another 264 multiple-registrant gTLD applications would be eliminated in normal contention.
That would leave us with 881 single-registrant gTLDs and 528 regular gTLDs in the root.
Scenario Two – Single-Registrant Applicants Lose Everything
Again, let’s assume that everybody passes their evaluations and there are no objections or withdrawals.
But this time let’s imagine that every single-registrant applicant in a contention set with at least one multiple-registrant bidder loses. This is the opposite of our first scenario.
According to my calculations, that would eliminate 117 single-registrant applications and 140 multiple-registrant applications.
Again, normal contention would take care of another 264 multiple-registrant applications.
That would leave us with 795 single-registrant gTLDs in the root and 614 others.
In both of these scenarios, at either extreme of the possible contention outcomes, single-registrant gTLDs are in the comfortable majority of delegated gTLDs.
Of course, there’s no telling how many applications of all types will choose to withdraw, fail their evaluations, or be objected out of the game, so the numbers could change considerably.
As another disclaimer: this is all based on our preliminary analysis of the applications, subject to a margin of error and possible changes in future as we refine our categorization algorithms.