ICANN approves “digital archery” gTLD batching

It’s official. ICANN’s board of directors has approved the widely derided “time target variance” procedure for batching new generic top-level domain applications.
It’s now being officially called “digital archery”.
The ICANN board met on Wednesday to vote in favor of the system, which was first outlined by senior VP Kurt Pritz at the Costa Rica meeting earlier this month.

Resolved (2012.03.28.01), the Board confirms the approval of secondary timestamp/digital archery as the mechanism for sorting new gTLD applications into batches, and directs that the operational details of the mechanism be communicated to applicants and the public as necessary and appropriate.

The digital archery system outlined in the resolution is pretty much identical to what Pritz described at ICANN 43.
New gTLD applicants will be asked to select a target time, then log into a special page of the TLD Application System to hit a “Submit” button as close to that time as possible.
The applicants whose clicks are recorded closest to the target time get to be in the first batch. ICANN will rotate through applicants from its five regions to avoid geographic bias.
There’ll also be an opt-out for those applicants for whom time to market is less important.
“The closer to zero the secondary timestamp is the more likely the application will be processed in the earliest batch, assuming the applicant has opted in to the earliest batch,” the resolution reads.
The system still appears to favor applicants skilled in drop-catching and other domainer disciplines.
Judging by screenshots released by ICANN today, there will be no Turing test (such as a CAPTCHA), which suggests that a scripted virtual “click” may be the best way to get a good timestamp.
It’s also not yet clear how ICANN plans to address the problem of network latency, to prevent applicants “renting a room at the Marina Del Rey Marriott” and thereby reducing the number of network hops between themselves and ICANN’s servers.
The resolution’s rationale reads: “Latency concerns are addressed in a fair manner so that applicants are not put at an advantage or disadvantage based on their geographic location”.
The digital archery system was met with borderline disbelief by many ICANN 43 attendees.
ICANN’s board resolution suggests that the system may have also been controversial within the board. It notes:

some members of the community have expressed concerns about whether the digital archery proposal is sensible and fair, and an informal subgroup of the Board has studied the feasibility, benefits, and risks of the proposal as well as alternative batching mechanisms such as auction.

9 Comments Tagged: batching, digital archery, icann. new gtlds, time target variance

How to get a $180,000 new gTLD refund

ICANN will give new gTLD applicants a $180,000 refund on their application fee if they withdraw before May 2, it has emerged.
This refund is not mentioned in the Applicant Guidebook, in which the maximum refund available is $148,000. Nor could I find any reference to it on the ICANN new gTLDs microsite.
However, in response to an inquiry from DI last night, an ICANN customer service rep said:

Applications withdrawn prior to the posting of the applied-for strings are qualified for a $180000 refund (if such payment has been made and reconciled by ICANN). The USD5000 registration fee is non-refundable.
The posting of the applied-for strings occurs approximately 2 weeks after the end of the application window, which closes on 12 April 2012. Applications withdrawn after the posting of the applied-for strings will receive refunds according to the refund schedule in section 1.5 of the Applicant Guidebook.

At least one other person, new gTLD consultant Michael Palage of Pharos Global, was told substantially the same thing by the new gTLD service center earlier this week.
I believe ICANN is currently targeting May 2 for its Big Reveal, when we all find out who’s applying for what. May 1, I believe, has been ruled out because it’s a public holiday in some parts of the world.
I don’t think this apparently obscure refund opportunity significantly increases the risk of gaming, but I can see how it might alter some applicants’ strategies.
It’s possible, for example, that in some cases it might now make more sense for an applicant to announce its bid between April 12 and May 2.
After April 12, nobody will be able to file a competing, gaming application, but revealing a strong bid might be enough to scare already-competing applicants into dropping out for a 97% refund.
I don’t think it really helps reluctant dot-brand applicants, which have asked for the $180,000 refund to be available after they know what the competitive landscape for similar strings looks like.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, refunds, tas

.radio is now a contested gTLD

The proposed .radio generic top-level domain is now officially contested, after the European Broadcasting Union confirmed that it plans to apply for the gTLD.
It’s the second .radio candidate to publicly reveal its intentions after BRS Media’s long-public bid.
The Executive Board of the EBU met in London yesterday – cutting it pretty fine given ICANN’s deadlines – and officially approved the bid, according to an EBU announcement.
The organization said in a statement:

the .radio TLD would allow the EBU to create an internet-based platform where the world’s radio broadcasters could assemble. Closer networking ‘under one roof’ would also bolster their position as an indispensible media sector, whose development would be accelerated by new radio services.

The EBU said its bid is supported by the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU); Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU); African Union of Broadcasting (AUB); Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU); International Association of Broadcasting (IAB); North American Broadcasters Association (NABA); Organizacion de Telecomunicaciones Iberoamericanas (OTI).
The EBU is a Swiss trade association comprising national broadcasters, mostly based in Europe.
It’s also known for its annual Eurovision Song Contest broadcast, a singing competition which is known at least in the UK as a bit of tacky joke.
Oh, and the EBU has confirmed that it is going to apply for .eurovision, which appears to be the first example – but certainly not the last – of a probably wholly unnecessary dot-brand.
BRS Media, which also has longstanding plans to apply for .radio, is the current registry operator for the repurposed ccTLDs .am and .fm.
BRS still plans to apply for .radio, according to CEO George Bundy.
“We always felt that our knowledge of the On-Air AND Online Radio marketplace, backed with 15 years of real (.FM/.AM) registry experience provides us with a much better understanding in managing, marketing and operating an Industry specific top-level domain, like .Radio,” he said.

7 Comments Tagged: .eurovision, .radio, brs media, ebu, european broadcasting union

Post your job opening on DI for $1 a day

I’d like to introduce a new jobs feature for DomainIncite readers.
As you’ll be able to see in the sidebar to the left, and in the header above, DI Jobs is now live on the site.
If you’re in the domain name industry you probably already know that most of your colleagues and competitors read DI, so I think this might be a great way for you to find new talent.
I’m using SimplyHired, a third-party service, for the listings. The jobs you can see right now — which may vary based on your IP address — are likely to be what it calls “backfill”.
It’s a bit like Google Adsense, and I’ve been made aware that one or two of the listings might therefore appear to be a bit distasteful to begin with (Whois email address scraping? Really?) but these will be bumped from view once a small number of DI reader jobs are posted.
For now, the top five most recently posted jobs will be listed in the sidebar, and the rest will be accessible via jobs.domainincite.com.
The introductory price for a listing is $90 for 90 days, just a buck a day.

Comment Tagged: .jobs, domainincite

.nxt new gTLD conference open for registration

The third .nxt conference on new generic top-level domains opened for early bird registrations today.
Having appeared twice in San Francisco, this time it’s my home town of London’s turn to host the event.
Organizer Kieren McCarthy is hoping to attract an international audience passing through London on their way to the ICANN 44 public meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
The conference will be held at the Park Plaza Victoria in central London on June 20 to 22, ending just before the first day of meetings in Prague.
The three-track agenda can be found here.
I attended the first two .nxts in person and remotely and I’ve found that McCarthy is pretty good at lining up an excellent range of compelling speakers and panelists.
The main drawback some have found is that many of the attendees are likely to be the same faces you’ll see at ICANN meetings.
However, with this being the first .nxt to happen after April 12 – when hundreds of new companies have filed their applications and committed to enter the domain name industry – there very well might be a broader range of delegates at the London show.
Early bird pricing, available before April 12, starts at £399 ($632) plus 20% tax for the full three days. It then goes up to £599 ($949) plus tax. Day passes are also available.
You can take advantage of the discounted pricing by registering here.

1 Comment Tagged: .nxt, ICANN, new gTLDs

Timing of .com contract renewal is telling

The timing of the publication of the renegotiated .com registry contract may give Verisign and ICANN the chance to duck some criticism about its price-raising powers.
According to ICANN’s announcement last night, the draft contract is up for public comment until April 26, a week before we find out how much new gTLD business Verisign has won.
Verisign is expected to have secured a large share of the burgeoning market for new gTLD back-end registry services.
It is whispered that a great many North American brands planning to apply for their own dot-brand gTLDs prefer Verisign as their registry provider, due to its reputation for stability.
That up-time is of course provided by a robust, distributed infrastructure paid for over the years by the same .com registrants now facing four more years of price increases.
It’s debatable whether Verisign can continue to make a convincing public interest case for .com price hikes if it’s also profiting by hosting dot-brands on the same boxes and pipes.
But because the public comment period closes April 26 and ICANN does not plan to publish the new gTLD applications until May 2, the argument that Verisign is using .com buyers to subsidize its dot-brand business will have to be made without hard data to back it up.
I doubt such arguments would be heard anyway, frankly. ICANN pretty much has its hands bound by the 2006 contract when it comes to messing around with pricing controls.
For those opposed to price increases, a more effective lobbying strategy might head straight to Washington DC, where the Departments of Commerce and Justice will both study the deal from September.

2 Comments Tagged: .com, ICANN, new gTLDs, renewal, verisign

ICANN asked to protect the names of body parts

There’s been no shortage of special pleading in relation to ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program, but this has to be the wackiest yet.
The National Health Council, an American advocacy group, has written to ICANN to ask for extra brand protection for the names of body parts, disabiliies and diseases.
Seriously.
NHC president Myrl Weinberg wrote:

Because it is not possible to trademark a body part (e.g., lung, liver) or a disease category (e.g., arthritis, diabetes), it is difficult for the patient advocacy community to protect the use of such words.
…
We strongly urge ICANN to set forth a process that investigates the potential for misunderstanding, confusion, and harm when awarding gTLDs utilizing the name of a body part or disease/disability.

The letter was inexplicably sent to ICANN’s public comment period on the Universal Acceptance of TLDs. Needless to say it’s completely off-topic, not to mention extremely late.
What seems to have happened is that the NHC’s members received a briefing recently from an ICANN staffer as part of its outreach program and what they learned gave them the willies^TM.

5 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, ICANN, national health council, new gTLDs, trademarks

New .com contract revealed: Verisign gets to raise prices, ICANN makes millions more

ICANN and Verisign both stand to make oodles of cash from their renewed .com registry contract.
A proposed draft of the next .com Registry Agreement was published by ICANN late this evening.
It would enable Verisign to carry on raising its .com registry fee by 7%, in four of the next six years. This provision, which was in the 2006 agreement also, was not unexpected.
But the deal will also see Verisign pay ICANN millions of dollars more in transaction fees.
Instead of a quarterly lump sum, which is capped at $4.5 million in the current contract, ICANN will instead get a $0.25 fee for every year of a .com registered, renewed or transferred.
According to my quick-and-dirty calculations, that would have brought ICANN approximately $6 million in extra revenue — roughly $24 million in total — from .com domains last year.
(The most recent .com registry reports show billable transactions per month worth about $2 million to ICANN, using the new agreement’s calculation. However, under the current agreement ICANN can only collect $18 million per year, according to its last approved budget.)
The revised contract contains several other changes also. I’ll have more coverage of those tomorrow.
The deal, which is not expected to come into effect until the end of November, is now open for public comment until April 26.
It needs to be approved by the ICANN board of directors, the Verisign board and the US Department of Commerce before it is finally signed.

7 Comments Tagged: .com, department of commerce, ICANN, registry agreement, verisign

The Olympics and the death of the GNSO, part deux

ICANN’s GNSO Council today narrowly voted to approve controversial special brand protections for the Olympic and Red Cross movements in the new gTLD program.
The vote this afternoon was scheduled as an “emergency” measure after the Council’s dramatic showdown at the ICANN public meeting in Costa Rica earlier this month.
Then, the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group forced a deferral of the vote on the grounds that ICANN’s proper bottom-up policy-making processes had not been followed.
Today, a virtually identical motion barely squeaked through, turning on just a single vote after all six NCSG councilors abstained in protest.
It was a fairly tense discussion, as these things go.
“This is a sham of a proposal cooked up by a couple of lobbyists and shoved down the GNSO’s throat and that’s why I’m abstaining,” said Robin Gross, sitting in for absent councilor Wendy Seltzer.
“I’m abstaining to avoid the downfall of the GNSO Council,” said fellow NCSG councilor Rafik Dammak.
Essentially, the non-coms are upset that the decision to give special protection to the Olympics, Red Cross and Red Crescent appeared to be a top-down mandate from the ICANN board of directors last June.
(The board was itself responding to the demands of its Governmental Advisory Committee, which had been lobbied for special privileges by the organizations in question.)
ICANN policies are supposed to originate in the community, in a bottom-up fashion, but in this case the normal process was “circumvented”, NCSG councilors said.
Rather than bring the issue of special protection to the GNSO constituencies of which they are members, the IOC and Red Cross went directly to national governments in the GAC, they said.
The motion itself is to create a new class of “Modified Reserved Names” for the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook, comprising solely of strings representing the Olympic and Red Cross.
Unlike the current version of the Guidebook, the International Olympic Committee and Red Cresent and Red Cross would actually be able to apply for their own brands as gTLDs.
The Guidebook would also give these Modified Reserved Names the same protection as ICANN itself in terms of string similarity – so Olympus might have a problem if it applies for a dot-brand.
Of course, the GNSO Council resolution does not become law unless it’s approved by the ICANN board of directors and implemented by staff in the Applicant Guidebook.
With the March 29 and April 12 application deadlines approaching, there’s a limited – some might say negligible – amount of time for that to happen if the GNSO’s work is to have any meaning.
That said, ICANN chair Steve Crocker said on more than one occasion during the Costa Rica meeting that he wants the board to be more flexible in its scheduling, so it’s not impossible that we’ll see an impromptu board meeting before Thursday.

8 Comments Tagged: gnso, icann. new gtlds, ioc, olympics, red cross

ICANN adds 266 new gTLD applicants in a week

Remember that last-minute rush I was telling you about?
ICANN has revealed that it now has 556 registered users in its Top-Level Domain Application System, up from 290 just a week ago.
Each TAS account can be used to apply for 49 new gTLDs (not 50 as previously reported), so we’re looking at anywhere from 0 to 27,244 new gTLD applications.
Based on what I’ve heard from consultants, I estimate that the true number of applications represented by these 556 accounts could be over 1,000.
Companies applying for dot-brand gTLDs are in many cases also applying for a couple of keyword gTLDs related to their vertical industry too, I hear.
Fairwinds Partners, which has been mostly working with skeptical brands, said this week that its clients on average are applying for 2.7s gTLD each.
Applied across all the TAS accounts registered to date, that would mean 1,501 applications.
The deadline for new TAS registrations is this Thursday, March 29, at 2359 UTC. That’s 1659 in ICANN’s native California and 1959 on America’s east coast.
Remember that while the UK switches from GMT (which is the same as UTC) to BST tomorrow morning, UTC does not observe daylight savings and remains the same.

14 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, tas