New gTLD Application Tracker 3.0 launched

While we’ve added several smaller requested features to the DI PRO New gTLD Application Tracker over the last few months, the time has come for the second big update to the service.
Subscribers have asked for a number of changes and upgrades to make it easier to quickly get at the data they need, and we’re happy to oblige.
The Application Tracker, has been updated in three areas.
New “Current Status” Tab
Talking to subscribers over the last few weeks, it became clear that different people are using the Application Tracker in different ways for different reasons.
Some want to be able to find out if, for example, an application has ever been objected to or received GAC advice, while others only want to know whether those objections and advice are still active.
From today, both use cases are made easier with the introduction of a new Current Status tab.
Searches conducted under this tab automatically filter out all withdrawn and rejected applications. If a contention set has been won, the winner will not display as contested in results.
Similarly, if an application managed to fight its way through objections or GAC advice, it will show as unopposed and unencumbered in search results pages.

Subscribers who want to carry on using the service to access historical information about applications can continue to use the previous version of the Application Tracker under the new “Original Status” tab.
Full IE Results
The existing IE Results database has been folded into the Application Tracker under a new tab, and there’s also a new option to see the full scores for each application that has passed through Initial Evaluation.
The new IE Results (Detailed) tab shows the scores each application received for each of the 27 Applicant Guidebook questions for which scores are made available
The Basic tab shows the financial and technical evaluation subtotals along with other information about the applicant and back-end provider.
New Search Options
With ICANN’s publication of Interilse Consulting’s report into the potential security risks of new gTLDs last week, each string was assigned a risk profile: Low, High or Uncalculated.
The database was updated with this information the same day it was published, but now you can search on it too, choosing to limit your search to, or omit, any of the three classes.
You can now also search for, or exclude, applications that have been rejected by ICANN. There are only three such applications right now, but I’m sure this option will become more useful in future.
Past and Future Updates
For details of all the original features of the Application Tracker, see this April blog post. For DI PRO subscription information, click here.
Subscribers can send suggestions for future updates to kevin@domainincite.com, as always.

2 Comments Tagged: di pro

Former Go Daddy lawyer to run for Arizona governor

Former Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones wants to run for Governor of Arizona, it emerged last week.
Jones is planning to stand for the Republican nomination, filing her paperwork on Friday. She announced the move on Twitter:

Filed papers for Gov campaign today. Time to work for AZ since AZ has been so good to me. Formal announcement in Sep. #humbled #azgop

— Christine Jones (@JonesForGov) August 9, 2013

Her campaign site plays on her record of testifying before the US Congress on internet-related issues such as fake pharmacies and child abuse materials, saying:

She also helped drive federal Internet-related legislation, including laws to keep the Web safe from child predators and rogue online pharmacies. For example, she helped push through bills such as the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act, the Protect Our Children Act, and the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act.

“Helped drive” appears to be a reference to Congressional testimony such as her statements about Go Daddy’s anti-CAM practices in 2006.
As well as children, her site also ticks the usual Republican politician boxes of religion (she’s a church singer, apparently) and the military (her husband is a retired US Air Force officer).
Jones was with Go Daddy for 10 years, leaving in May 2012.
One of her final projects at the company was her vocal support for the Stop Online Piracy Act in late 2011, which ultimately proved a vote-loser among Go Daddy’s customers, forcing a company U-turn.
Most of Arizona’s governors have been Democrats. The incumbent, Jan Brewer, is a Republican. The last three have been female.
Go Daddy employs thousands of people in the state, when it would be much cheaper to ship those jobs overseas, something that could score Jones brownie points if she can figure out a way to take credit for it.
For Go Daddy, if Jones were to win, having a friend in high places would no doubt prove a boon. The election is next year.

1 Comment Tagged: christine jones, go daddy, governor

TLDH commits to four private gTLD auctions

Top Level Domain Holdings has committed four of its applied-for gTLDs to private auctions due to kick off tomorrow.
The four strings are .guide, .casa, .网址 (“web address” in Chinese) and .fishing, each of which has only one competing applicant.
The company will bid against Donuts on .casa and .guide, Demand Media on .fishing and Hu Yi Global Information Resources on .网址.
Results of the auctions, managed by Innovative Auctions, are expected to be announced next week.
TLDH was initially cautious about the idea of private auctions, but later decided to participate, for reasons CEO Antony Van Couvering explained in this June article.
Over 100 strings, including 68 from Donuts, are expected to be hitting the block with Innovative this week. The first six strings to be auctioned this way raised an average of $1.5 million per string.
TLDH has 49 strings in active contention.

3 Comments Tagged: .casa, .fishing, .guide, demand media, donuts, ICANN, innovative auctions, new gTLDs, private auctions, tldh, top level domain holdings, 网址

dotShabaka Diary — Day 2

This is the second in DI’s series following the progress of شبكة. applicant dotShabaka Registry as it prepares to be one of the first new gTLD registries to launch.
The following journal entry was written by dotShabaka general manager Yasmin Omer:

Date: Saturday 10 August 2013
It has been nearly a month since we signed our Registry Agreement with ICANN and we are still confused about TMCH Integration Testing, which is a concern given it’s now seven weeks out from ICANN’s first delegation date.
Whilst we have access to the Sandbox LORDN file test environment, ICANN happened to mention that the ‘OT&E environment’ is available in this week’s webinar. That’s new information.
We still have no idea what the process is for TMCH integration testing or how we access the environment. Are there test cases? What’s the schedule?
The lack of information is a concern as we need to pass TMCH Integration to provide Sunrise notice. Let’s hope it’s not as complicated as PDT.
In other news, we received an email from Wendy Profit (Registry Product Manager) yesterday. It’s the first formal email we have received since signing our contract nearly a month ago.
The email contained a copy of the contract and a spreadsheet for contact details. Not sure if Wendy is indeed our account manager or if we even have one. We have sent an email asking her the same. Clearly we have a few questions for an Account Manager once we get one.

You can read past and future entries in this series here.

Comment Tagged: dotshabaka diary, ICANN, new gTLDs, pdt, pre-delegation testing, tmch, trademark clearinghouse

Another 105 gTLDs pass IE, another two withdrawals

With only three weeks of scheduled Initial Evaluation results remaining, ICANN has passed another 105 applications.
We’ve also seen another two withdrawals over the last day or so — Monster Worldwide withdrew its dot-brand application for .beknown while Microsoft dropped its bid for .skydrive.
Here are the IE passes, with links as ever to DI PRO.

.xyz .irish .fairwinds .nextdirect .vegas .cookingchannel .baby .group .mopar .seek .mitsubishi .meet .nfl .baseball .art .eurovision .fish .brussels .healthcare .antivirus .team .partners .art .jeep .scholarships .osaka .final .northwesternmutual .pet .hdfcbank .yokohama .boots .rentals .chat .diet .luxe .hyatt .phone .family .merckmsd .weir .duck .kred .site .google .book .accountants .casino .coupons .verisign .bayern .store .pub .you .shop .music .barclays .cricket .now .piaget .community .piperlime .now .circle .app .vip .cancerresearch .lidl .diy .nissan .website .yun .style .moi .app .cleaning .date .taxi .mlb .cruise .stream .catering .dating .dot .theatre .reliance .hotel .black .jlc .construction .vision .shop .shell .cards .bank .azure .tech .dog .security .aigo .nationwide .metlife .vanish .indians

Only 331 applications remain in IE. Another 1,482 have passed.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, initial evaluation, new gTLDs, withdrawals

The UK is going nuts about porn and Go Daddy and Nominet are helping

In recent months the unhinged right of the British press has been steadily cajoling the UK government into “doing something about internet porn”, and the government has been responding.
I’ve been itching to write about the sheer level of badly informed claptrap being aired in the media and halls of power, but until recently the story wasn’t really in my beat.
Then, this week, the domain name industry got targeted. To its shame, it responded too.
Go Daddy has started banning certain domains from its registration path and Nominet is launching a policy consultation to determine whether it should ban some strings outright from its .uk registry.
It’s my beat now. I can rant.
For avoidance of doubt, you’re reading an op-ed, written with a whisky glass in one hand and the other being used to periodically wipe flecks of foam from the corner of my mouth.
It also uses terminology DI’s more sensitive readers may not wish to read. Best click away now if that’s you.
The current political flap surrounding internet regulation seems emerged from the confluence of a few high-profile sexually motivated murders and a sudden awareness by the mainstream media — now beyond the point of dipping their toes in the murky social media waters of Twitter — of trolls.
(“Troll” is the term, rightly or wrongly, the mainstream media has co-opted for its headlines. Basically, they’re referring to the kind of obnoxious assholes who relentlessly bully others, sometimes vulnerable individuals and sometimes to the point of suicide, online.)
In May, a guy called Mark Bridger was convicted of abducting and murdering a five-year-old girl called April Jones. It was broadly believed — including by the judge — that the abduction was sexually motivated.
It was widely reported that Bridger had spent the hours leading up to the murder looking at child abuse imagery online.
It was also reported — though far less frequently — that during the same period he had watched a loop of a rape scene from the 2009 cinematic-release horror movie Last House On The Left
He’d recorded the scene on a VHS tape when it was shown on free-to-air British TV last year.
Of the two technologies he used to get his rocks off before committing his appalling crime, which do you think the media zeroed in on: the amusingly obsolete VHS or the golly-it’s-all-so-new-and-confusing internet?
Around about the same time, another consumer of child abuse material named Stuart Hazell was convicted of the murder of 12-year-old Tia Sharp. Again it was believed that the motive was sexual.
While the government had been talking about a porn crackdown since 2011, it wasn’t until last month that the prime minister, David Cameron, sensed the time was right to announce a two-pronged attack.
First, Cameron said he wants to make it harder for people to access child abuse imagery online. A noble objective.
His speech is worth reading in full, as it contains some pretty decent ideas about helping law enforcement catch abusers and producers of abuse material that weren’t well-reported.
But it also contained a call for search engines such as Bing and Google to maintain a black-list of CAM-related search terms. People search for these terms will never get results, but they might get a police warning.
This has been roundly criticized as unworkable and amounting to censorship. If the government’s other initiatives are any guide, it’s likely to produce false positives more often than not.
Second, Cameron said he wants to make internet porn opt-in in the UK. When you sign up for a broadband account, you’ll have to check a box confirming that you want to have access to legal pornography.
This is about “protecting the children” in the other sense — helping to make sure young minds are not corrupted by exposure to complex sexual ideas they’re almost certainly not ready for.
The Open Rights Group has established that the opt-in process will look a little like this:

Notice how there are 10 categories and only one of them is related to pornography? As someone who writes about ICANN on a daily basis, I’m pretty worried about “esoteric materials” being blocked.
As a related part of this move, the government has already arranged with the six largest Wi-Fi hot-spot operators in the country to have porn filters turned on by default.
I haven’t personally tested these networks, but they’re apparently using the kind of lazy keyword filters that are already blocking access to newspaper reports about Cameron’s speech.
Censorship, in the name of “protecting the children” is already happening here in the UK.
Which brings me to Nominet and Go Daddy
Last Sunday, a guy called John Carr wrote a blog post about internet porn in the UK.
I can’t pretend I’ve ever heard of Carr, and he seems to have done a remarkably good job of staying out of Google, but apparently he’s a former board member of the commendable CAM-takedown charity the Internet Watch Foundation and a government adviser on online child safety.
He’d been given a preview of some headline-grabbing research conducted by MetaCert — a web content categorization company best known before now for working with .xxx operator ICM Registry — breaking down internet porn by the countries it is hosted in.
Because the British rank was surprisingly high, the data was widely reported in the British press on Monday. The Daily Mail — a right-wing “quality” tabloid whose bread and butter is bikini shots of D-list teenage celebrities — on Monday quoted Carr as saying:

Nominet should have a policy that websites registered under the national domain name do not contain depraved or disgusting words. People should not be able to register websites that bring disgrace to this country under the national domain name.

Now, assuming you’re a regular DI reader and have more than a passing interest in the domain name industry, you already know how ludicrous a thing to say this is.
Network Solutions, when it had a monopoly on .com domains, had a “seven dirty words” ban for a long time, until growers of shitake mushrooms and Scunthorpe Council pointed out that it was stupid.
You don’t even need to be a domain name aficionado to have been forwarded the hilarious “penisland.net” and “therapistfinder.com” memes — they’re as old as the hills, in internet terms.
Assuming he was not misquoted, a purported long-time expert in internet filtering such as Carr should be profoundly, deeply embarrassed to have made such a pronouncement to a national newspaper.
If he really is a government adviser on matters related to the internet, he’s self-evidently the wrong man for the job.
Nevertheless, other newspapers picked up the quotes and the story and ran with it, and now Ed Vaizey, the UK’s minister for culture, communications and creative industries, is “taking it seriously”.
Vaizey is the minister most directly responsible for pretending to understand the domain name system. As a result, he has quite a bit of pull with Nominet, the .uk registry.
Because Vaizey for some reason believes Carr is to be taken seriously, Nominet, which already has an uncomfortably cozy relationship with the government, has decided to “review our approach to registrations”.
It’s going to launch “an independently-chaired policy review” next month, which will invite contributions from “stakeholders”.
The move is explicitly in response to “concerns” about its open-doors registration policy “raised by an internet safety commentator and subsequently reported in the media.”
Carr’s blog post, in other words.
Nominet — whose staff are not stupid — already knows that what Carr is asking for is pointless and unworkable. It said:

It is important to take into account that the majority of concerns related to illegality online are related to a website’s content – something that is not known at the point of registration of a domain name.

But the company is playing along anyway, allowing a badly informed blogger and a credulous politician to waste its and its community’s time with a policy review that will end in either nothing or censorship.
What makes the claims of Carr and the Sunday Times all the more extraordinary is that the example domain names put forward to prove their points are utterly stupid.
Carr published on his blog a screenshot of Go Daddy’s storefront informing him that the domain rapeher.co.uk is available for registration, and wrote:

www.rapeher.co.uk is a theoretical possibility, as are the other ones shown. However, I checked. Nominet did not dispute that I could have completed the sale and used that domain.
…
Why has it not occurred to Nominet to disallow names of that sort? Nominet needs to institute an urgent review of its naming policies

To be clear, rapeher.co.uk did not exist at the time Carr wrote his blog. He’s complaining about an unregistered domain name.
A look-up reveals that kill-all-jews.co.uk isn’t registered either. Does that mean Nominet has an anti-Semitic registration policy?
As a vegetarian, I’m shocked and appalled to discovered that vegetarians-smell-of-cabbage.co.uk is unregistered too. Something must be done!
Since Carr’s post was published and the Sunday Times and Daily Mail in turn reported its availability, five days ago, nobody has registered rapeher.co.uk, despite the potential traffic the publicity could garner.
Nobody is interested in rapeher.co.uk except John Carr, the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail. Not even a domainer with a skewed moral compass.
And yet Go Daddy has took it upon itself, apparently in response to a call from the Sunday Times, to preemptively ban rapeher.co.uk, telling the newspaper:

We are withdrawing the name while we carry out a review. We have not done this before.

This is what you see if you try to buy rapeher.co.uk today:

Is that all it takes to get a domain name censored from the market-leading registrar? A call from a journalist?
If so, then I demand the immediate “withdrawal” of rapehim.co.uk, which is this morning available for registration.

Does Go Daddy not take male rape seriously? Is Go Daddy institutionally sexist? Is Go Daddy actively encouraging male rape?
These would apparently be legitimate questions, if I was a clueless government adviser or right-leaning tabloid hack under orders to stir the shit in Middle England.
Of the other two domains cited by the Sunday Times — it’s not clear if they were suggested by Carr or MetaCert or neither — one of them isn’t even a .co.uk domain name, it’s the fourth-level subdomain incestrape.neuken.co.uk.
There’s absolutely nothing Nominet, Go Daddy, or anyone else could do, at the point of sale, to stop that domain name being created. They don’t sell fourth-level registrations.
The page itself is a link farm, probably auto-generated, written in Dutch, containing a single 200×150-pixel pornographic image — one picture! — that does not overtly imply either incest or rape.
The links themselves all lead to .com or .nl web sites that, while certainly pornographic, do not appear on cursory review to contain any obviously illegal content.
The other domain cited by the Daily Mail is asian-rape.co.uk. Judging by searches on several Whois services, Google and Archive.org, it’s never been registered. Not ever. Not even after the Mail’s article was published.
It seems that the parasitic Daily Mail really, really doesn’t understand domain names and thought it wouldn’t make a difference if it added a hyphen to the domain that the Sunday Times originally reported, which was asianrape.co.uk.
I can report that asianrape.co.uk is in fact registered, but it’s been parked at Sedo for a long time and contains no pornographic content whatsoever, legal or otherwise.
It’s possible that these are just idiotic examples picked by a clueless reporter, and Carr did allude in his post to the existence of .uk “rape” domains that are registered, so I decided to go looking for them.
First, I undertook a series of “rape”-related Google searches that will probably be enough to get me arrested in a few years’ time, if the people apparently guiding policy right now get their way.
I couldn’t find any porn sites using .uk domain names containing the string “rape” in the first 200 results, no matter how tightly I refined my query.
So I domain-dipped for a while, testing out a couple dozen “rape”-suggestive .co.uk domains conjured up by my own diseased mind. All I found were unregistered names and parked pages.
I Googled up some rape-themed porn sites that use .com addresses — these appear to exist in abundance, though few appear to contain the offending string in the domain itself — and couldn’t find any that have bothered to even defensively register their matching .co.uk.
So I turned to Alexa’s list of the top one million most-popular domains. Parsing that (.csv), I counted 277 containing the string “rape”, only 32 of which (11%) could be loosely said to be using it in the sense of a sexual assault.
Whether those 32 sites contain legal or illegal pornographic content, I couldn’t say. I didn’t check. None of them were .uk addresses anyway.
Most of the non-rapey ones were about grapes.
I’m not going to pretend that my research was scientific, neither am I saying that there are no rape-themed .co.uk porn sites out there, I’m just saying that I tried for a few hours to find one and I couldn’t.
What I did find were dozens of legitimate uses of the string.
So if Nominet bans the word “rape” from domain name registrations under .uk — which is what Carr seems to want to happen — what happens to rapecrisis.org.uk?
Does the Post Office have to give up grapevine.co.uk, which it uses to help prevent crime? Does the eBay tools provider Terapeak have to drop its UK presence? Are “skyscrapers” too phallic now? Is the Donald Draper Fan Club doomed?
And what about the fine fellows at yorkshirerapeseedoil.co.uk or chilterncoldpressedrapeseedoil.co.uk?
If these examples don’t convince you that a policy of preemptive censorship would be damaging and futile, allow me to put the question in terms the Daily Mail might understand: why does Ed Vaizey hate farmers?

24 Comments Tagged: .uk, censorship, ed vaizey, go daddy, john carr, metacert, nominet

Realtors withdraw five gTLD community objections

The US-based National Association of Realtors has withdrawn its Community Objections against five applicants for .realestate and .realty, according to well-placed sources.
The five separate objections, which had been combined into one action under the auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Centre for Expertise, were withdrawn today.
NAR is a million-member trade association — apparently the largest in the US — comprising real estate agents that agree to pay dues and abide by its code of conduct.
It owns a trademark on REALTORS® and, judging by its objection and web site, is not shy about letting you know it. In the States, only NAR members get to call themselves “realtors”.
It has applied for .realestate via a subsidiary, dotRealEstate LLC, and had objected to applications for .realestate from Donuts, Top Level Domain Holdings and Uniregistry, and applications for .realty from Donuts and smaller portfolio applicant Fegistry.
The objections were combined in May, with the consent of the responding applicants.
NAR argued (pdf) that the applied-for strings are synonymous with its community of members, and that the other applicants’ proposed open-house registration policies would tarnish their reputation.
To win a Community Objection, you have to show among other things that there’s a strong nexus between the string at issue and the “clearly delineated” community you purport to represent.
While the case seems to have been withdrawn before it was decided by the ICC panel, NAR’s rivals were zeroing in on this as a weak spot in its objections.
The Uniregistry response (pdf) is as amusingly brutal as you’d expect from company counsel John Berryhill, using the NAR’s own marketing materials and positions in previous lawsuits against it.
Uniregistry pointed for example to a video on NAR’s web site that says:

We need your help to ensure that the term ‘REALTOR’ continues to mean member of the National Association of Realtors, and not just any real estate agent.

Uniregistry took this as an admission from NAR that the nexus between the universe of “real estate” professionals and the NAR is not as strong as the organization had tried to make out.
In Donuts’ two responses (pdf and pdf) also attacked this angle, arguing

Objector and its members make up only a fraction of that “community”… myriad divergent interests and countless individuals and organizations populate the sphere of “realty” around the world. Objector does not claim to speak on behalf of any of them, but rather only its own membership in the United States.

Now that the objections have been withdrawn, and all the applications are still active, the .realestate and .realty contentions sets are both heading to auction or private settlement.

2 Comments Tagged: donuts, Fegistry, icc, national association of realtors, top level domain holdings, uniregistry

dotShabaka Diary — Day 1

Three weeks ago, dotShabaka Registry became the first of the current crop of new gTLD applicants to sign a registry contract with ICANN, but there’s still a way to go before launch.
The company has offered to provide DI readers, in a series of journal entries, with an insight into its operational experiences and concerns as شبكة. progresses on the path to delegation and launch.
With a Prioritization Draw number of 3, dotShabaka will be often be the first to encounter any pitfalls that emerge in the latter stages of the new gTLD evaluation and delegation process.
DI has agreed to carry the journal, unedited, in the belief that a regular focus on operational matters from a high-prioritization applicant will prove an invaluable resource for applicants and program observers alike.
Here’s the first entry:

Welcome to The شبكة. Journal.
In association with Domain Incite, dotShabaka Registry has launched a journal series to provide regular updates on our progress through delegation and then launch.
The aim will be to offer a transparent insight into the operations of شبكة.. As the first new TLD to sign a Registry Agreement and begin the delegation process, we are throwing the door wide open and will report the good, bad and ugly of our experience via this journal.
You can expect to read reports on our interaction with ICANN, how we handle technical issues and our progress with establishing commercial operations.
For example, we can report that:
شبكة. began pre-delegation testing in the first-available slot on Monday 5th August – nearly three weeks after ICANN’s ‘earliest path’ timetable published in Durban. We are confident of a successful outcome after passing beta testing in July.
Updated RPM Requirements were finally published for comment on 6th August. The good news for شبكة. is the welcomed proposed revisions to support anchor tenants. The bad news is that public comment process is open until 18 September. Another delay!
This lack of certainty has made it impossible for us to finalise launch plans and policies, which is frustrating.
The good news is شبكة. is in the low risk category for New gTLD Collision Risk Management and we don’t expect any impact on the timeline for delegation. Who will be left standing with شبكة. after ICANN’s ‘risk mitigation’ actions for name collisions and GAC Advice are accounted for?
We welcome your feedback and encourage readers to comment below in the Domain Incite comment box. We’ll attempt to address questions the community may have.
Please stay tuned for future updates exclusively via Domain Incite.

One-time disclosure: I’d like to state for the benefit of those who are seemingly always ready to pounce on DI for “selling out” that the journal series are not “sponsored” posts.
There’s no financial relationship whatsoever between DI and dotShabaka or any of its affiliated companies. This is just about the info.

4 Comments Tagged: dotshabaka, dotshabaka diary, ICANN, international domain registry, new gTLDs, شبكة

Another dot-brand gTLD bid withdrawn

Eighty-year-old adhesives company Avery Dennison has withdrawn its application for the .avery new gTLD.
The application was ranked 1,780 in ICANN’s evaluation queue, meaning it was due to receive its Initial Evaluation results shortly. By withdrawing now, the company gets a bigger refund.
According to its application, Avery Dennison makes “cutting-edge pressure-sensitive solutions, self-adhesive and reflective base materials, and innovative consumer and office products”.
A dot-brand with a Key-Systems back-end, .avery was the company’s only new gTLD application.

Comment Tagged: .avery, avery dennison, ICANN, new gTLDs, withdrawals

Trademarks still trump founders in latest TMCH spec

New gTLD applicants and ICANN seem to have failed to reach an agreement on how new registries can roll out founders programs when they launch.
A new draft of the Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements published last night, still appears to make it tricky for new gTLD registries to sell domain names to all-important anchor tenants.
The document (pdf), which tells registries what they must do in order to implement Sunrise and Trademark Claims services, is unchanged in many major respects from the original April draft.
But ICANN has published a separate memo (pdf) comprising a handful of asks made by applicants, which highlight where differences remain. Both are now open for public comment until September 18.
Applicants want text adding to the Requirements document that would allow them to give or sell a small number of domains to third parties — namely: anchor tenants — before and during Sunrise periods.
Their suggested text reads:

As set forth in Specification 5 of the Agreement, Registry Operator MAY activate in the DNS up to one hundred (100) names necessary for the operation and promotion of the TLD. Pursuant to these Requirements, Registry Operator MAY register any or all of such domain names in the TLD prior to or during the Sunrise Period to third parties in connection with a registry launch and promotion program for the TLD (a “Qualified Registry Launch Program”), provided that any such registrations will reduce the number of domain names that Registry Operator MAY otherwise use for the operation and promotion of the TLD as set forth in Specification 5.

The base new gTLD Registry Agreement currently allows up to 100 names to be set aside before Sunrise only on the condition that ownership stays in the hands of the registry for the duration of the registration.
Left unaltered, that could complicate deals where the registry wants to get early registrants through the door to help it promote its gTLD during the critical first few months.
A second request from applicants deals with the problem that Sunrise periods also might interfere with preferred allocation programs during the launch of community and geographic gTLDs.
An example given during the recent ICANN Durban meeting was that of the .london registry giving first dibs on police.london to the Metropolitan Police, rather than a trademark owner such as the Sting-fronted band.
The applicants have proposed to allow registries to request “exemptions” to the Requirements to enable this kind of allocation mechanism, which would be offered in addition to the standard obligatory RPMs.
Because these documents are now open for public comment until September 18, that appears to be the absolute earliest date that any new gTLD registry will be able to give its mandatory 30-day pre-Sunrise warning.
In other words, the hypothetical date of the first new gTLD launch appears to have slipped by a couple of weeks.

Comment Tagged: anchor tenants, founders, ICANN, new gTLDs, sunrise, tmch, trademark claims, trademarks