.transformers gTLD bid transforms into pile of burnt cash

Toy-maker Hasbro has withdrawn its application for the .transformers new gTLD.
It was Hasbro’s only application, and it’s the first example of an applicant that paid to participate in ICANN’s new gTLD prioritization draw last December subsequently withdrawing its bid.
One of the longer and more eyebrow-raising applied-for strings, .transformers brings the number of withdrawn applications to 18, most of which were dot-brands. Now, 1,912 bids remain.
The bid had a prioritization number of 131, putting it toward the very top of the queue of non-IDN applications.
If many more applications with high prioritization numbers withdraw, it would raise serious questions about the validity of the argument that participating in the draw indicates a non-defensive bid.
Hasbro’s application suggested that it was filed mainly defensively, it’s “Mission/Purpose” stated as primarily: “To secure and protect the Applicant’s key brand (“TRANSFORMERS”) as a gTLD”.
Maybe it was worried that an electrical parts manufacturer might go for the same string?
It’s the sixth application to be withdrawn in a week, following General Motors’ pulling of its .gmc, .cadillac and .chevrolet bids and Hartford Fire Insurance’s withdrawal of .thehartford.
UPDATE (February 20): ICANN tells me that there are currently only three more new gTLD applications in its withdrawal pipeline.

6 Comments Tagged: .transformers, hasbro, ICANN, new gTLDs, withdrawal

Hackers may have stolen .edu domain passwords

Owners of .edu domain names have been told to change their passwords after hackers compromised a server belonging to registry manager Educause.
The registry said today that it has deactivated the admin passwords for all .edu domains after discovering a “security breach” that gave attackers access to hashed passwords for .edu registrants.
The attack also compromised passwords for users of the Educause web site, the organization said.
The .edu domain is of course reserved for US-based educational institutions, and is considered one of the most secure and prestigious TLDs available.
Educause said it “immediate steps to contain this breach and is working with Federal law enforcement, investigators, and security experts to make sure this incident is properly addressed.”
The registry did not say whether the attack is related to the attack against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last month, which reportedly was enabled via an Educase hack.

Comment Tagged: .edu, educause, mit, security

PIR starts pre-registration for .ngo domain names

Public Interest Registry has become the first major gTLD registry to start taking pre-registrations for a not-yet-approved gTLD.
PIR said today that it’s allowing non-governmental organizations to register an “expression of interest” for .ngo and .ong domains.
Pre-registrations are of course free and non-binding. They’re mainly a way to opening the marketing communications channel with customers well in advance of the launch of a TLD.
PIR does not expect to launch .ngo or .ong until 2014. Its ICANN evaluation priority numbers for the two TLDs are 810 and 958, in the first half of the list.
Pre-registration is not a new concept, of course, but it’s one generally embraced more often by registrars (eNom and United Domains are the two most prominent examples) rather than incumbent registries.
For PIR to start engaging directly with potential registrants is one of the first signs that, in the wake of ICANN’s lifting of the ban on vertical integration between registries and registrars, the new gTLD market won’t be playing by the old rules.

6 Comments Tagged: .ngo, .ong, ICANN, new gTLDs, public interest registry

Pile up! GM cancels two more new gTLD bids

Is General Motors bowing out of ICANN’s new gTLD program completely? It’s certainly looking that way, following the withdrawal of two more of its five original applications.
ICANN updated its site yesterday to reflect that GM has yanked its bids for .chevrolet and .cadillac, two of its proposed automotive dot-brands.
It comes just a few days after its .gmc application was pulled, and suggests that its remaining applications — for .buick and .chevy — may also be withdrawn in the near future.
The total number of gTLD applications withdrawn is now up to 17, a dozen of which are dot-brands, from an original list of 1,930.
We may be seeing more in the near future. Applications withdrawn before ICANN publishes Initial Evaluation results — expected to start March 23 — qualify for a refund of 70%, or $130,000. After that, the refund halves.
The final number of withdrawn applications will be telling, and likely to inform future new gTLD application rounds.
If it turns out a large number of companies applied for dot-brands purely defensively (I wouldn’t consider 12 to 17 withdrawals a large number) then ICANN may have to rethink how the program is structured.

1 Comment Tagged: .buick, .cadillac, .chevrolet, .chevy, .gmc, general motors, ICANN, new gTLDs, withdrawals

Two more dot-brand gTLD bids withdrawn

Two applications for “dot-brand” new gTLDs were pulled last week.
General Motors has withdrawn its bid for .gmc and Hartford Fire Insurance Company dropped .thehartford.
Both bids had been assigned priority numbers in ICANN’s prioritization draw last December, but neither applicant had purchased tickets, suggesting a lack of interest in operating the TLDs.
The withdrawal of .gmc at this time, less than two weeks before the publication by ICANN of string similarity evaluation results, is particularly interesting, and a little strategically puzzling.
There’s an active application by GMO Internet for .gmo, which could conceivably be ruled confusingly visually similar to .gmc.
By pulling out now, GM has lost its right to file a string similar challenge at a later date, and may have lost its ability to win .gmc in all future application rounds too (if .gmo is approved this time around, GMO could claim confusing similarity against future .gmc bids).
But GM still has active bids for the much more meaningful .chevrolet, .buick, .chevy and .cadillac, all of which also have prioritization numbers suggesting GM mainly applied defensively.
Hartford’s .thehartford was its only application.
The two withdrawals bring the total to date to 15, at least 10 of which were dot-brands. There are now 1,915 applications still in play.
The new gTLD consultants involved in the withdrawn bids — which one assumes were mostly filed defensively based on advice received — are a fairly mixed bunch so far.

Comment Tagged: .gmc, .thehartford, dot-brand, ICANN, new gTLDs

ALAC likely to object to five .health gTLDs

ICANN’s At-Large Advisory Committee is planning to formally object to four applications for the .health gTLD and one for .健康, which means “.healthy” in Chinese.
Bids backed by Afilias, Donuts, Famous Four Media and Straat Investments (the investment vehicle of .CO Internet CEO Juan Diego Calle), as well as China’s StableTone, are affected.
Dev Anand Teelucksingh, chair of the ALAC’s new gTLD review group, posted the following to an ALAC mailing list this weekend:

Objection statements on community grounds will be drafted for the applications for .health given that the four tests for community objection grounds were passed. The gTLD RG will attempt to put together the objection statements to the applications for .health in time for RALO [Regional At-Large Organization] review around 22 February 2013.

The ALAC is able to file objections to new gTLD bids, using funds provided by ICANN, on only the Community or Limited Public Interest grounds.
Of the four strings before it (.health, .nyc, .patagonia and .amazon) the ALAC review group decided that only a Community objection against .health met its criteria.
These are the only confirmed ALAC objections to date.
The ALAC had received a request to object from the International Medical Informatics Association, which said:

These five proposals are seen as problematic by the global health community for the following reasons:

• None of the applicants demonstrates that the name will be operated in the public interest.
• None of the applicants demonstrates adequate consumer protection mechanisms.
• All of the applicants are commercial in nature and none represent the health community.

Two governments — France and Mali — both expressed concerns about .health on similar grounds by filing Early Warnings last November.
ICANN’s deadline for filing objections is March 13.

1 Comment Tagged: .health, .健康, alac, community objection, objections

Governments to reveal new gTLD objection shortlist next week

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee will next week reveal its shortlist of new gTLD applications that face possible death-by-government.
A brief notice posted to the GAC web site yesterday said:

During the week of February 18th, 2013, the GAC will post its list of applications for consideration by the GAC as a whole in Beijing, in the context of developing GAC advice as outlined in the Applicant Guidebook (Module 3 section 3.1).

This appears to mean that the GAC has been doing a lot of preparatory work to get the list of 1,916 remaining new gTLD applications down to a more manageable number.
ICANN is expecting to receive GAC Advice on New gTLDs, as defined in the Applicant Guidebook, not too long after its Beijing public meeting closes on April 11.
As reported earlier today, ICANN expects to start approving new gTLDs April 23. It’s not going to do this before it’s received the GAC’s go-ahead.
GAC Advice could take the form of a consensus recommendation to ICANN to kill off one or more new gTLD bids, or non-consensus “concerns” that would be less deadly to applicants.
GAC members have already issued 242 Early Warnings, which were designed to give applicants the opportunity to change their plans or withdraw before receiving full GAC Advice.
No doubt some of the companies in receipt of Early Warnings will have done enough in the interim to put governments’ minds at rest, but there’s also nothing stopping the GAC adding new applications to its hit-list.
The European Commission and Iran both submitted lists of concerns outside of the official Early Warning process, and there’s been no official word from the GAC yet as to what status they have.
With that in mind, it’s difficult to predict how many applications, and which ones, are going to be on the GAC’s new shortlist.

1 Comment Tagged: early warnings, gac, gac advice on new gtlds, ICANN

Chehade names the date: ICANN to approve first new gTLDs on April 23

ICANN expects to approve the first new gTLDs on April 23, just 68 days from now.
The long-awaited date, which of course comes with certain caveats, was revealed by CEO Fadi Chehade in a video interview with ICANN media affairs chief Brad White today.
Chehade said:

We are now targeting to be able to recommend for delegation the first new gTLD as early as the 23rd of April, and I can say this because we have made great progress in the last few weeks in aligning all the necessary pieces that would permit us to recommend a delegation as early as the 23rd of April.
Having said that, I want to be very clear there are some things that we can’t control that may cause this date to slip, but even in that case we are looking for a slippage of days or weeks, not months anymore. So we are definitely now with clear visibility on a set of processes that allow us to hit the first recommended delegation as early as the 23rd of April.

The news is surprising; those following the new gTLD program closely are more accustomed to hearing announcements about delays.
Chehade’s recent comments at a meeting of registries and registrars in Amsterdam, in which he said his personal preference would be to delay the whole new gTLD program by a year, did not suggest the imminent announcement of so ambitious a deadline.
He addresses those comments in the interview.
The news strongly suggests that ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee — arguably the biggest unknown quantity at this point in the process — is on target to submit its formal Advice on New gTLDs not too long after the ICANN public meeting in Beijing, which ends April 11.
I would have put money on that not happening.
The date also suggests that ICANN is unlikely to extend the window for filing objections against applications, currently closing March 13, despite the very tight deadline this will create for potential objectors.
Because the results of the String Similarity Panel’s deliberations — which will very likely create new contention sets — will not be published until March 1, many organizations will only get seven or eight working days to finalize and submit their strategic objections.

10 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs

Architelos runs new gTLD market readiness survey

New gTLD consultancy/software provider Architelos is carrying out a survey of new gTLD applicants in an effort to gauge how ready they are to launch.
The company is of the view that many applicants are under-prepared for the amount of work coming down the pike when they finally pass through ICANN’s long-running evaluation process.
The five-minute Q&A covers areas such as financial planning, compliance, hiring and launch marketing.
It’s also a way for Architelos to prospect for potential customers, though responses can be anonymous if desired.
If you’re an applicant, you can participate in the survey here.

Comment Tagged: architelos, new gTLDs

Mystery gTLD applicant to take Google fight to lawmakers

An as-yet unidentified new gTLD applicant plans to lobby Washington DC and Brussels hard to get dozens of Google’s new gTLD bids thrown out of ICANN on competition grounds.
Phil Corwin of the law firm Virtuallaw, who is representing this applicant, told DI yesterday that his client believes Google plans to use new gTLDs to choke off competition in the web search market.
“They’re trying to use the TLD program to enhance their own dominance and exclude potential competitors,” Corwin said. “We think this should be looked at now because once these TLDs are delegated the delegations are basically forever.”
He’s planning to take these concerns to “policy makers and regulators” in the US and Europe, in a concerted campaign likely to kick off towards the end of the month (his client’s identity will be revealed at that time, he assured us).
Corwin’s client — which is in at least one contention set with Google, though in none with Amazon — reckons ICANN’s new gTLD program is ill-suited to pick the best candidate to run a gTLD.
If objections to new gTLD applications fail, the last-resort method for deciding the winner of a contention set is auction. Google obviously has the resources to win any auction it finds itself in.
“On any TLD Google has applied for, nobody can beat them,” said Corwin. “They have $50bn cash, plus the value of their stock. If they want any of the TLDs they’ve applied for, they get them.”
“A string contention process that relies solely on an auction clearly favors the deep-pocketed,” he said.
Google applied for 101 new gTLDs, 98 of which remain in play today. A small handful of the strings are dot-brands (such as .youtube and .google), with the majority comprising dictionary words and abbreviations.
Some of its generic bids propose open business models, while others would have “closed” or single-registrant business models. As we reported on Friday, this has kicked off a firestorm in the ICANN community.
Corwin said that Google appears to be planning to close off not only individual TLDs, but entire categories of TLDs.
For example, Google has applied for .youtube as a brand, but it’s also applied for .film, .movie, .mov, .live, .show and .tube with a variety of proposed business models.
“You can pretty well bet that they’ll exclude those that will pose a competitive threat to YouTube,” Corwin said.
Search will become much more important after the launch of hundreds of new gTLDs, Corwin reckons, as consumers are “not going to know that most of them exist”.
“Generic words are the perfect platform for constructing vertical search engines that can compete against Google’s general search engine,” Corwin said.
“Google is trying to buy up not just one but multiple terms that cover the same goods and services in key areas of internet commerce, and in effect control them so competition cannot arise and challenge Google’s dominance as a search engine,” he said.
Google has not yet revealed in any meaningful way how its search engine will handle new gTLDs.
The US Federal Trade Commission, at the conclusion of an antitrust investigation, recently gave Google a pass for its practice of prominently displaying results from its own services on results pages.
With that in mind, if Google were to win its contention set for .movie, but not for .film, is it possible that .movie would get a competitive advantage from preferential treatment in search?
Corwin reckons that Google anti-competitive intentions are already suggested by its strategy in ICANN’s new gTLD prioritization draw, which took place in December.
Of the roughly 150 applications for which Draw tickets were not purchased, Google is behind 24 of them — including .movie, .music, .tube and .search — 22 of which are in contention sets.
As a result, these contention sets have all been shunted to the back of ICANN’s application processing queue, adding many months to time-to-market and costing rival, less-well-funded applicants a lot of money in ongoing overheads.
“We see Google playing a rather different game here to most other applicants in terms of their motivation, which is not to enter the market but to protect their market dominance,” Corwin said.
Corwin said the game plan is to taken all these concerns to policy makers and regulators in the US and Europe in order to get governments on-side, both inside and outside of the ICANN process.
Corwin is also counsel and front-man for domainer group the Internet Commerce Association, but he said that the new anti-Google drive is unrelated to his work for ICA.
So why is his client only bringing up the issue now? After all, we’ve all known about the contents of every new gTLD application since last June.
My hunch is that Google is playing hard-ball behind the scenes in settlement talks with contention set rivals.
Contention sets can be resolved only when all but one of the applicants drops out, either following an ICANN auction or private buy-outs. Most applicants favor private resolution because it offers them the chance to recoup some, all, or more than the money they splashed out on applying.
That game plan probably does not apply to Google, of course, which is not wanting of funds. The company may even have good reason to prefer ICANN auctions, in order to to discourage those who would apply for new gTLDs in future just in order to put their hands in Google’s pockets.
The topic of closed generics and competition is likely to be a hot-button topic at ICANN’s next public meeting, coming up in Beijing this April.
Members of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee have already expressed some concerns about many “closed gTLD” applications made by Google, Amazon and others.
ICANN’s board of directors is currently mulling over what to do about the issue, and has thrown it open to public comment for your feedback.

9 Comments Tagged: amazon, closed generics, google, ICANN, new gTLDs, single-registrant, virtuallaw