Weirdest new gTLD launch yet? .wed launches with a single registrar

The new gTLD .wed went into sunrise yesterday with the strangest pricing model yet and a stringent Registry-Registrar Agreement that seems to have scared off all but one registrar.
Atgron is positioning .wed as a space for marrying couples to celebrate their weddings, but only temporarily.
It seemingly has little interest in domain investors or ongoing customer relationships beyond one or two years.
If you register a second-level .wed domain, you can have it for $150 a year for the first two years, according to the Atgron web site. After that, the price rockets to $30,000 a year.
Registrars, resellers and wedding-oriented businesses are allowed to opt out of the third-year spike on their own .wed names if they join Atgron’s reseller program and sell at least 10 a year.
Unlike Vox Populi, which is actively marketing .sucks domains at $25,000 as a reasonable value proposition, Atgron jacks the price up as a deterrent to registrants holding on to names too long. It says:

.WED domain names are sold to couples for one or two years to celebrate their wedding. The domain names then become available to another couple… Mary and John can have MaryandJohn.WED and then YES the next Mary and John can have MaryandJohn.WED a year or two later and so on and so on.

That alone would be enough to put off most registrars, which value the recurring revenue from ongoing annual renewals, but I gather that the .wed RRA contains even more Draconian requirements.
Incredulous registrars tell me that Atgron wants them to create an entirely new web site to market .wed domains — they’re not allowed to sell the names via their existing storefronts.
The only registrar to bite so far is EnCirca, known historically for promoting obscure gTLDs such as .pro and .travel, which is selling .wed via a new standalone site at encirca.wed.
I also gather that Atgron won’t let registrars opt out of selling its third-level .wed domains, which are expected to go for about $50 a year with no third-year spike.
That didn’t work well for .name — registrars hated its three-level structure, forcing the registry to ultimately go two-level — and I don’t think it’s going to work for .wed either.
Registrars also tell me that Atgron wants to ban them from charging a fee for Whois privacy on .wed domains. They can offer privacy, but only if it’s free to the registrant.
With privacy a relatively high-margin value-add for registrars, it’s hardly surprising that they would balk at having this up-sell taken away from them.
As weird as this all sounds, it is of course an example of the kind of innovative business models that the new gTLD program was designed to create. Mission accomplished on that count.
Another thing the program was designed to create is competition, something Atgron will soon encounter when Minds + Machines arrives with .wedding and eats .wed’s lunch. In my view.
The .wed launch period is also quite unusual.
Atgron is running a landrush period concurrently with its 30-day sunrise period.
Even if you don’t own a trademark, you can apply for a .wed domain today. You’ll get a refund if your name is registered by a trademark owner during sunrise, and names won’t go live until April 20.
The registry has extended the 90-day Trademark Claims period to cover the sunrise period too, so it appears to be in compliance with ICANN rights protection rules on that count.
It’s a 30-day sunrise, so it’s first-come, first served if you’re a trademark owner.
As for sunrise pricing, the third-year spike appears to apply too.
Atgron documentation does say there’s going to be an option to purchase a 10-year trademark block for a one-time fee, but I couldn’t find any way to do this on the EnCirca.wed web site today.

Rockefeller slams .sucks as “predatory shakedown”

US Senator Jay Rockefeller today came out swinging against the proposed .sucks new gTLD, saying it looks like little more than a “predatory shakedown” by applicants.
In a letter to ICANN (pdf), Rockefeller has particular concern about Vox Populi, the .sucks applicant owned by Canadian group Momentous.
As we’ve previously reported, Vox Populi plans to charge trademark owners $25,000 a year for defensive registrations and has already started taking pre-registrations even though .sucks is still in contention.
Rockefeller told ICANN:

I view it as little more than a predatory shakedown scheme… A gTLD like “sucks” has little or no socially redeeming value and it reinforces many people’s fears that the purpose of the gTLD expansion is to enrich the domain name industry rather than benefit the broader community of internet users.

Unusually, I find myself in agreement with Rockefeller, who chairs the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee — Vox Populi’s plan does bring the domain industry into disrepute.
But it’s not the only applicant for .sucks. Top Level Spectrum and Donuts have also applied for the string.
While neither has revealed their proposed pricing, in Donuts’ case a blocking registration via its Domain Protected Marks List service will cost substantially less on a per-domain basis.
Rockefeller asks that ICANN keep his thoughts in mind when reviewing the application, and I’m sure ICANN will pay lip service to his concerns in response, but I don’t think the letter will have much impact.
A bigger question might be: does Rockefeller’s letter foreshadow more Congressional hearings into the new gTLD program?
The last one, which Rockefeller chaired (for about five minutes, before he buggered off to do more important stuff) was in December 2011, and they have tended to happen every couple of years.
Such a hearing would come at an inopportune moment for ICANN, which is trying to distance itself from the perception of US oversight in light of the Edward Snowden spying revelations.
It’s been setting up offices all over the world and championing the forthcoming NetMundial internet governance meeting, which is happening in Brazil next month.

Will .exposed see a big sunrise?

Donuts’ new gTLD .exposed goes into sunrise today, but will it put the fear into trademark owners?
It’s arguably the first “ransom” TLD to go live in the current round and the first since .xxx, which scared mark holders into blocking over 80,000 domains back in late 2011.
Most new gTLD sunrise periods to date — most of which have been focused on vertical niches — have had sunrise registrations measured in tens or hundreds rather than thousands.
But .exposed, I would say, is in the same free speech zone as yet-to-launch .sucks and .gripe, which lend themselves well to having a company, product or personal name at the second level.
Brand protection registrars are encouraging their clients to pay special attention to this type of gTLD.
Will this cause a spike in sunrise sales for Donuts over the next 60 days?
It might be difficult to tell, given that Donuts also offers brand owners a blocking mechanism via the Domain Protected Marks List service, so the domains don’t show up in the zone files.
But DPML blocks can be overturned by others with matching trademarks, so some trademark owners may decide to register the name instead for an overabundance of caution.

Extortion.sucks — Vox Pop CEO defends “under-priced” $25,000 sunrise fee

Vox Populi Registry, the .sucks new gTLD applicant backed by Momentous Corp, is to charge trademark owners $25,000 to participate in its Sunrise period, should it win the TLD.
Not only that, but it’s become the first new gTLD applicant that I’m aware of to start taking pre-registration fees from trademark owners while it’s still in a contention set with other applicants.
At first glance, it looks like plain old trademark-owner extortion, taken to an extreme we’ve never seen before.
But after 45 minutes talking to Vox Pop CEO John Berard this evening, I’m convinced that it’s worse than that.
The company is setting itself up as the IP lobby’s poster child for everything that is wrong with the new gTLD program.
If Vox Pop wins the .sucks contention set — it’s competing against Donuts and Top Level Spectrum — it plans to charge trademark owners $25,000 to participate in Sunrise and $25,000 a year thereafter.
Registrations during general availability, whether they match a trademark or not, will cost $300 a year.
During the pre-registration period, the Sunrise fee is $2,500 and the “Priority Reservation” fee is $250.
The Sunrise fee is, I believe, higher than any sunrise fee in any TLD ever to launch.
But Berard said that he believes Vox Pop’s .sucks proposition is, if anything, “under-priced”.
“Most companies spend far more than $25,000 a month on a public relations agency, most companies spend more than $25,000 a month on a Google ad campaign,” he said.
“Companies spend millions of dollars a year on customer service. We view .sucks as an element of customer service on the part of companies,” he said.
Berard, a 40-year veteran of the public relations business, said that he believes .sucks represents an opportunity for brands to engage with their customers, gaining valuable insight that could help them improve product development or customer service.
“The last thing I view .sucks as is a domain name. That’s the last value proposition for .sucks,” he said. “The primary value proposition is as a key and innovative part of customer service, retention and loyalty.”
It’s about giving companies “the ability to bring internet criticism and commentary out of the shadows and into the light” and “an opportunity to actually have a legitimate ability to correct misconceptions and engage, in much the way they’re doing now with Facebook”, he said.
It’s all about helping companies create a dialogue, in other words.
But Berard said that Vox Pop does not intend to launch any value-added services on .sucks domains.
While a domain name may be the “last value proposition” of .sucks, it is also the only thing that Vox Pop is actually planning to sell.
Asked to justify the $25,000 Sunrise fee, at first Berard pointed to policies that he said will ensure a transparent space for conversation.
“A company might not have to register its brand in .sucks, because if someone else does the policies and practices that we hope to deploy give that company a transparent opportunity to participate,” Berard said. “There’s no chasing unknown people down dark alleys for unfounded criticism. It will all be done in the light of day.”
“We have built-in policies that prevent sites from being parked pages,” he said. “The site must be put to that use — of customer service — whether you are the company that owns [the brand] or a customer that wants to complain about it.”
There was some confusion during our conversation about what the policies are going to be.
At first it sounded like companies would be obliged to run criticism/conversation sites targeting their own brands or risk losing their domains, but Berard later called to clarify that while pages cannot be parked under the policy, they can be left inactive.
It will be possible, in other words, for a company to register its brand.sucks and leave the associated site dark.
The registry would also have an “authenticated Whois database”, he said, though it would allow registrants to use privacy services.
There would also be prohibitions on cyber-bullying and porn in .sucks, if Vox Pop wins it. It has committed to these policies in its Public Interest Commitments (pdf)
But the company does not appear to be doing anything that ICM Registry did not already do when it launched .xxx a couple of years ago, when it comes to making brand owners’ lives easier.
In fact, it’s planning to do a lot less, while being literally a hundred times more expensive.
By contrast, if Donuts wins .sucks, brand owners will be able to defensively block their marks using the Domain Protected Marks List for $3,000 over five years, which would cover all of Donuts 200-300 new gTLDs.
There doesn’t appear to be any good reason Vox Pop is charging prices well above the market rate, in my view, other than the fact that the company reckons it can get away with it.
In what may well be a deliberate move to put pressure on trademark owners, Vox Pop is also the first registry I’ve encountered to say it will do a 30-day, as opposed to a 60-day, Sunrise period.
Under ICANN rules, registries have to give at least 30 days warning before a 30-day Sunrise starts, but once it’s underway they are allowed to allocate domains on a first-come-first-served basis.
All of the 30-odd registries currently in Sunrise have opted for the traditional 60-day option instead, where no domains are allocated until the end of the period.
There’s also the question of accepting Sunrise pre-registrations before Vox Pop even knows whether it will get to run .sucks.
There are two other applicants and Berard said that he reckons the contention set is likely to go to an ICANN last-resort auction.
Judging by ICANN’s preliminary timetable, the .sucks auction wouldn’t happen until roughly September next year, by my reckoning.
Anyone who pre-registers today will have to wait a year before they can use (or not) their domain, if they even get to register it at all.
Any money that is taken during the pre-reg period will be refunded if Vox Pop fails to launch.
In the meantime, it will be sitting in Momentous’ bank account where the company, presumably, will be able to use it to try to win the .sucks auction.
Trademark owners, in my view, should vote with their wallets and stay the hell away from Vox Pop’s pre-registration service.
I’m not usually in the business of endorsing one new gTLD applicant over another, but I think Vox Pop’s Sunrise pricing is going to make the whole new gTLD program — and probably also ICANN and the domain name industry itself — look bad.
It’s a horrible reminder of a time when domain name companies were often little better than spammers, operating at the margins and beyond of acceptable conduct, and it makes me sad.
The new gTLD program is about increasing choice and competition in the TLD space, it’s not supposed to be about applicants bilking trademark owners for whatever they think they can get away with.

Only 29 gTLD applications still in IE as 101 pass and nine fail

ICANN has published what was scheduled to be its final week of Initial Evaluation results for new gTLD applications.
It was a bumper week for results as evaluators mopped up stragglers that had previously been asked to provide more information via Clarifying Questions. There were 101 passes and 9 failures.
There are still 29 applications without published results. An ICANN spokesperson said that the results for these will continue to be delivered on a weekly basis as usual until all are done.
One hundred and one applications passed. These ones:

.origins .free .banamex .sex .dog .prof .rockwool .weather .farmers .itv .ford .hkt .inc .phd .blog .kid .esq .memorial .ira .art .gmbh .pccw .music .citi .bms .live .game .news .kone .shop .able .llc .frontier .flir .watches .tires .love .dds .ericsson .dunlop .volvo .fujitsu .telecity .movie .fidelity .mutuelle .stockholm .xperia .search .lupin .med .jewelry .kddi .tires .monster .news .lincoln .book .tube .mint .clinique .buy .goodyear .lego .seven .fresenius .richardli .llp .csc .ses .ftr .ikano .gallup .saxo .mutualfunds .baby .progressive .firestone .corp .music .movie .srl .retirement .seat .mba .pars .islam .nowruz .boston .persiangulf .tci .design .rip .sucks .shia .ally .style .halal .hotel .lifeinsurance .shriram

The failures, which are all “Eligible for Extended Evaluation” are:

• .livestrong (Lance Armstrong Foundation) — failed on both financial and technical questions. The first I recall seeing to be pushed into EE based on its proposed Registry Services. Also failed a drug test.
• .unicorn — Scored only 5 out of the required 22 points on its technical evaluation, easily the worst score I can recall seeing. Its back end provider is Gransy sro, a Czech-based registrar.
• .home (Dothome Ltd) — this is the .home bid Defender Security bought from CGR E-Commerce. The same one that filed all the Legal Rights Objections against other .home applicants. It failed its financial evaluation, but not because it failed to file its financial statements, which is usually the case.
• .smart (Smart Communications, Inc) — a dot-brand that failed technical.
• .art (EFLUX.ART, LLC) — failed technical and financial.
• These applications didn’t provide financial statements, so failed the financial questions: .transunion (Trans Union LLC), .pnc (PNC Domains LLC), .cipriani (Cipirani Hotel), .jcp (JCP Media Inc)

86 passes and two failures in this week’s new gTLDs

ICANN has just published this week’s batch of new gTLD Initial Evaluation results, revealing 86 passing scores and two applications that must go to Extended Evaluation.
The two failures are .ged and .bcg.
The .ged bid, which is intended to represent General Educational Development, was filed by a joint venture of the American Council on Education and the big publisher Pearson.
It’s the first example of an application to receive passing scores on both its financial and technical questions but to still require Extended Evaluation anyway.
The applicant had proposed a registry service related to internationalized domain names that gave the evaluation panels reason to believe a deeper evaluation was needed.
Uniquely so far, Extended Evaluation is likely to cost this applicant more money, due to the cost of a Registry Services Evaluation Panel.
Boston Consulting Group applied for .bcg as a dot-brand and failed because it scored a zero on its “Financial Statements” question, as most other IE failures have to date.
This weeks passing scores belong to these applications:

.redstone .institute .website .airtel .bestbuy .education .charity .shouji .alstom .multichoice .reit .bible .holiday .deutschepost .chrysler .terra .cam .inc .farm .cars .florist .financial .bet .design .cafe .sale .lundbeck .latino .iveco .inc .dodge .security .global .food .tradershotels .design .bond .zappos .rwe .commbank .landrover .house .cars .blog .fish .amazon .adult .wine .group .property .free .living .maserati .beauty .amsterdam .foodnetwork .broker .design .sucks .fans .tushu .discount .glass .fashion .search .school .linde .off .office .miami .trust .red .boats .immo .repair .dstv .claims .iinet .soccer .inc .mail .toshiba .law .love .suzuki .africa

There are now 730 applications still in Initial Evaluation. So far 1,092 have passed and 13 have failed.

Big week for new gTLDs as 114 apps pass

ICANN has just released this week’s Initial Evaluation results and it’s the biggest dump to date, with 114 applications getting through to the next stage of the process.
We’re now up to 628 passes, which is roughly one third of the original 1,930 applications.
Applications for these strings achieved passing scores (links to DI PRO):

.help .hosting .property .fashion .warman .love .yoga .winners .bnl .sexy .bauhaus .mnet .health .gratis .save .cfd .inc .tjmaxx .homegoods .tjx .deal .restaurant .spa .link .tech .airbus .city .dealer .bnpparibas .tvs .latino .boo .makeup .website .tips .amp .jpmorgan .kyknet .dad .vivo .kerryproperties .sucks .emerson .sas .lancaster .vin .lotto .homes .rodeo .goldpoint .movie .next .bloomberg .moda .tennis .song .nrw .alfaromeo .web .press .london .hot .futbol .windows .webjet .green .sarl .home .video .apartments .bingo .hotel .allstate .software .lanxess .mango .ferrari .coupon .broadway .drive .gea .law .engineering .epost .swiftcover .country .army .weber .broadway .marshalls .style .theater .samsung .firmdale .design .booking .tatamotors .komatsu .mls .abudhabi .vip .game .alibaba .like .store .lgbt .team .boats .tax .nikon .sony .you .citic .trade

No applications failed this week. We’re up to 700 in the prioritization queue.

Governments expand gTLD objection shortlist

With the start of its meetings in Beijing just a couple of days away, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has handed out clues as to which new gTLDs it might object to.
The GAC says that 20 specific bids have already been put forward by one government as potential recipients of GAC Advice, but that there are nine broad categories of concern.
Some of the categories seem to obviously apply to certain narrow types of gTLD, while others are broad enough to catch almost any bid the GAC doesn’t like the look of.
Any application that receives adverse GAC Advice at the end of the Beijing meeting faces, at the very least, a prolonged approval process along the lines of what .xxx had to endure.
The worst-case scenario is rejection of the bid by the ICANN board of directors.
These are the GAC’s categories, along with some educated guesses about which strings they could apply to:

• “Consumer protection” — could apply to anything, depending on how well-lobbied the GAC has been by a particular interest group. Any gTLD that could implausibly be argued to increase the risk of counterfeiting may show up here. A liberal interpretation could well capture .music or sports-related strings.
• “Strings that are linked to regulated market sectors, such as the financial, health and charity sectors” — Dozens of applications, such as those for .lawyer, .doctor, .health .bank, and .charity — will fall into this category.
• “Competition issues” — This most likely applies to applications for category-killer dictionary words where the applicant is already a dominant player in the relevant market, such as Google’s bid for .search or Amazon’s for .book.
• “Strings that have broad or multiple uses or meanings, and where one entity is seeking exclusive use” — Again, this could apply to the many controversial “closed” gTLD applications.
• “Religious terms where the applicant has no, or limited, support from the relevant religious organisations or the religious community” — I suspect that the the Vatican’s application for .catholic is less at risk than a Turkish company’s bid for .islam. Any Islam-related domains are likely to fail the “support” test, given the lack of centralized control over the religion.
• “Minimising the need for defensive registrations” — A category that seems to have been specially created for .sucks.
• “Protection of geographic names” — Most probably will be used to kill off DotConnectAfrica’s application for .africa and Patagonia Inc’s application for .patagonia. But will Amazon’s dot-brand bid also fall foul?
• “Intellectual property rights particularly in relation to strings aimed at the distribution of music, video and other digital material” — If the GAC buys into the lobbying and believes that an unrestricted .music or .movie gTLD would increase piracy, expect objections to some of those bids. The GAC doesn’t have to provide a shred of evidence to support its Advice at first, remember, so this is not as ludicrous a possibility as it sounds.
• “Support for applications submitted by global authorities” — This is a newly added category. If the GAC is proposing to submit advice in support of one application in a contention set, there’s no mechanism ICANN can use to ensure that he supported applicant wins the set. The Advice may turn out to be useless. Certain sports-related applications are among those with “global authority” backing.
• “Corporate Identifier gTLDs” — Not, as this post originally speculated, dot-brands. Rather, this applies to the likes of .inc, .corp, .llc and so on.
• “Strings that represent inherent government functions and/or activities” — Expect military-themed gTLDs such as .army and .navy to feature prominently here. Could also cover education and healthcare, depending on the government.

The GAC also plans to consider at least 20 specific applications that have been put forward as problematic by one or more governments, as follows:

Community name where the applicant does not have support from the community or the government: 1
Consumer protection: 2
Name of an Intergovernmental Organisation (IGO): 1
Protection of geographic names: 9
Religious terms: 2
Strings applied for that represent inherent government functions and/or activities: 3
Support for applications submitted by global authorities: 2

ICANN plans to formally approve the first batch of new gTLDs, with much ceremony, at an event in New York on April 23, but has said it will not approve any until it has received the GAC’s Advice.
The GAC is on the clock, in other words.
While it’s been discussing the new gTLDs on private mailing lists since last year’s Toronto meeting, it’s already missed at least self-imposed deadline. The information released today was due to be published in February.
While the ICANN Beijing meeting does not officially begin until next Monday, and the rest of the community starts its pre-meeting sessions at the weekend, the GAC starts its closed-session meetings this Thursday.

Australia leads the charge as governments file 242 new gTLD warnings

Governments of the world have filed 242 warnings on new gTLD applications, more than half of which came from Australia.
Warnings were filed against 145 strings in total, and in most cases governments issued the same warnings against all competing applications in a given contention set.
Australia was responsible for 129 warnings, accounting for most of the 49 warnings received by Donuts.
There are some surprises in there.
Notably, there were no warnings on any of the strings related to sex, sexuality or porn.
Given the amount of effort the GAC put into advising against .xxx, this is a big shock. Either governments have relaxed their attitudes, or none were willing to single themselves out as the anti-porn country.
No government warned on .gay.
The largest single recipient of warnings, with 49, was Donuts, the largest portfolio applicant.
The most-warned application, with 17 warnings, was DotConnectAfrica’s .africa. The company is contesting the gTLD without government support, and African nations objected accordingly.
Nigeria also warned Delta Airlines about its proposed .delta dot-brand,
The string “delta” is a protected ISO 3166 sub-national place name, as Delta is likely to discover when the Geographic Names Panel delivers the results of its evaluation.
Australia objected to .capital on the same grounds.
Top Level Domain Holdings was hit with warnings from Italy and South Africa based on a lack of government support for its geographic applications .roma and .zulu.
Remarkably, Samoa warned the three applications for .website on the grounds that they would be “confusingly similar” to its own ccTLD, .ws, which is marketed as an abbreviation for “website”.
The US warned on all 31 of Radix Registry’s applications, saying that the Directi company inappropriately included an email from the FBI in its bids, suggested an endorsement when none exists.
Australia, among its 129 warnings, appears to have won itself a lot of friends in the intellectual property community.
It’s objected to .fail, .sucks, .gripe and .wtf on the grounds that they have “overly negative connotations” and a lack of “sufficient mechanisms to address the potential for a high level of defensive registrations.”
It also issued warnings to applicants planning gTLDs covering “regulated sectors”, including .accountant, .architect and .attorney, without sufficient safeguards to protect consumers.
Generic strings with single-registrant business models — such as Google’s .app and .blog bids — are also targeted by Australia on competition grounds.
Australia more than any other governments appears to be trying to use its warnings as a way to enter into talks with applicants, with a view to remedial action.
Whether this will be permitted — applicants are essentially banned from making big changes to their applications — is another matter entirely.
The full list of warnings can be found here.

GAC Early Warnings confirmed for today. Here’s what I expect to see

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is ready to send out its Early Warnings on new gTLD applications today as scheduled, ICANN has confirmed.
The Early Warnings, which highlight applications that individual GAC members have problems with, are expected to be sent by the GAC to applicants and published by ICANN later.
Because the warnings are expected to be issued by individual governments, rather than the GAC as a whole, we could wind up seeing hundreds, due to multiple governments objecting to the same applications.
However, some governments may have decided to be conservative for precisely the same reason.
Governments won’t be able to hide behind the cloak of “GAC Advice”, as they did when .xxx was up for approval last year; the names of the governments will be on the warnings.
That’s not to say there won’t necessarily be safety in numbers. It’s possible that some warnings will be explicitly supported by multiple governments, potentially complicating applicant responses.
But which countries will provide warnings?
I’d be surprised if the US, as arguably the most vocal GAC player, does not issue some. Likewise, the regulation-happy European Commission could be a key objector.
It’s also my understanding that Australia has a raft of concerns about various applications, and has been leading much of the back-room discussion among GAC members.
Going out on a limb slightly, I’m expecting to see the warnings from Western nations concentrating largely on regulated industries, IP protection and defensive registrations.
We’re likely to see warnings about .bank and .sucks, for examples, from these governments. To a certain extent, any non-Community applications that could be seen as representing an industry could be at risk.
On the “morality” front, indications from ICANN’s public comment period are that Saudi Arabia has a great many problems with strings that represent religious concepts, and with strings that appear to endorse behavior inconsistent with Islamic law, such as alcohol and gambling.
But last time I checked Saudi Arabia was not a member of the GAC. It remains to be seen whether similar concerns will be raised by other governments that are members.
The one Early Warning we can guarantee to emerge is against .patagonia, the application from a US clothing retailer that shares its name with a region of South America.
The Argentinian government has explicitly said it will issue a warning against this bid, and I expect it to garner significant support from other GAC members.
The GAC Early Warnings stand to cause significant headaches for applicants, many of which are gearing up for a four-day US Thanksgiving weekend.
After receiving a warning, applicants have just 21 days to decide whether to withdraw their bid — receiving an 80% refund of their $185,000 application fee — or risk a formal GAC Advice objection next year.
But that’s not even half of the problem.
The GAC has indicated that it wants to be able to, effectively, negotiate with new gTLD applicants over the details of their applications after issuing its warnings.
At the Toronto meeting last month, the GAC asked ICANN to explain:

the extent to which applicants will be able to modify their applications as a result of early warnings.
[and]
how ICANN will ensure that any commitments made by applicants, in their applications or as a result of any subsequent changes, will be overseen and enforced by ICANN.

ICANN has not yet responded to these inquiries and it does not expect to do so until Thursday.
The fact is that ICANN has for a long time said that it does not intend to allow any applicant to make any material changes to their applications after submission. This was to avoid gaming.
It has since relaxed that view somewhat, by introducing a change request mechanism that has so far processed about 30 changes, some of which (such as .dotafrica and .banque) were highly material.
Whether ICANN will extend this process to allow applicants to significantly alter their applications in order to calm the fears of governments remains to be seen.
Whatever happens this even, many new gTLD applicants are entering unknown territory.