Chutzpah alert! DotKids wants ICANN handout to fight gTLD auction

New gTLD applicant DotKids Foundation has asked ICANN for money to help it fight for .kids in an auction against Amazon and Google.
The not-for-profit was the only new gTLD applicant back in 2012 to meet the criteria for ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, meaning its application fee was reduced by $138,000 to just $47,000.
Now, DotKids reckons ICANN has a duty to carry on financially supporting it through the “later stages of the process” — namely, an auction with two of the world’s top three most-valuable companies.
The organization even suggests that ICANN dip into its original $2 million allocation to support the program to help fund its bids.
Because .kids is slated for a “last resort” auction, an ICANN-funded winning bid would be immediately returned to ICANN, minus auction provider fees.
It’s a ludicrously, hilariously ballsy move by the applicant, which is headed by DotAsia CEO Edmon Chung.
It’s difficult to see it as anything other than a delaying tactic.
DotKids is currently scheduled to go to auction against Google’s .kid and Amazon’s .kids application on October 10.
But after ICANN denied its request for funding last month, DotKids last week filed a Request for Reconsideration (pdf), which may wind up delaying the auction yet again.
According to DotKids, the original intent of the Applicant Support Program was to provide support for worthy applicants not just in terms of application fees, but throughout the application process.
It points to the recommendations of the Joint Applicant Support working group of the GNSO, which came up with the rules for the support program, as evidence of this intent.
It says ICANN needs to address the JAS recommendations it ignored in 2012 — something that could time quite some time — and put the .kids auction on hold until then.

.kids gTLD auction probably back on

Amazon, Google and a small non-profit appear to be headed to auction to fight for ownership of child-friendly new gTLDs.
ICANN last week defrosted the contention set for .kids/.kid; DotKids Foundation’s bid for .kids is no longer classified as “On-Hold”.
This means an ICANN-managed “last resort” auction is probably back on, having been cancelled last December in response to a DotKids request for reconsideration.
The RfR was thrown out by the ICANN board of directors, on the recommendation of its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, in May.
.kids and .kid are in the same contention set because DotKids fought and won a String Confusion Objection against Google’s .kid application.
It’s also directly competing with Amazon for .kids.
A last-resort auction would mean that proceeds would be deposited in a special ICANN bank account currently swollen with something like a quarter-billion dollars.

Failure to launch: 10 years-old gTLDs that are still dormant

Over six years after the last new gTLD application window closed, more than one in 10 new gTLDs have yet to launch, even though some have been delegated for over four years.
Once you filter out duplicates, withdrawals and terminations from the original 1,930 applications, there were a maximum of roughly 1,300 potential new gTLDs from the 2012 round.
But, by my calculations, 144 of those have yet to even get around to their sunrise period. Most of those haven’t even filed their launch plans with ICANN yet.
Here’s 10 from that list I’ve picked based on how interesting they appear to me, in no particular order.
Yes, DI is doing listicles now. Hate-mail to the usual address.
.forum
This one’s owned by Jay Westerdal’s Top Level Spectrum, the same company behind .feedback, .realty and others. I quite like the potential of this string — the internet is chock-full of forums due to the easy availability of open-source forum software — but so far nobody’s gotten to register one. It was delegated back in June 2015 and doesn’t have a published launch plan as yet. An FAQ reading just saying “Jay was here !!!!! Test deploy..delete me later…” has been up on its site since at least last September. TLS is also sitting on .contact and .pid (for “personal ID”) with no launch dates in sight.
.scholarships
Owned by Scholarships.com, there’s a whiff of the defensive about this one. It’s been in the root since March 2015 but its site states the registry “is still finishing launch plans and will provide updates as they become available”. Scholarships.com is a site that connects would-be higher education students to potential sources of funding. It’s difficult to imagine many ways the matching gTLD could possibly help in that mission.
.giving
JustGiving, the UK-based charity campaign aggregator, won this gTLD and had it delegated in August 2015, but seemingly still hasn’t figured out what it wants to do with it. It’s not a dot-brand, so it’s presumably mulling over ways to give .giving domains to fundraisers in a way that does not compromise credibility. Whatever its plans, it’s taking its sweet time over them.
.cancerresearch
This is a weird one. Delegated four years ago, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation rather quickly went live with a bunch of interlinked .cancerresearch web sites, using its contractually permitted allotment of promotional domains. Contractually, it’s not a dot-brand, but it’s basically acting like one, having never actually given ICANN any info about sunrise, eligibility, trademark claims, general availability, etc. Technically, it’s still pre-launch, and I can’t see any reason why it would want to budge from that status. Huge loophole in the ICANN rules?
.beauty
Another whiff of gaming here. International woman-shaming powerhouse L’Oreal still has no announced plans to launch .beauty, .skin or .hair, which it had originally wanted to run as so-called “closed generics” (presumably to keep the keywords out of the hands of competitors). Of its small portfolio of generic gTLDs, delegated in 2016, it has actually launched .makeup already, with a $6,000 retail price and a strategy seemingly based on registry-owned domains matching the names of makeup-focused social media influencers. At least it’s actually selling names, even if nobody’s bought one yet.
.budapest
One of three city TLDs that were delegated back in 2014 but have yet to start selling domains. MMX is to run it in partnership with the local government of the Hungarian city, if it ever gets off the ground. Madrid (.madrid) and Zurich (.zuerich) have both also yet to roll out, although Zurich has settled on early 2019 for its launch.
.fan
Regular DI readers won’t be surprised to see this one on the list. In what may turn out to be a shocking waste of money, .fans registry Asiamix Digital acquired the singular .fan from Donuts back in 2015 and promptly let it sit idle for the next three years. Currently, with .fans turning out to be a flop, Asiamix has money troubles and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it under new ownership before too long. It’s not a terrible string, so there’s some potential there.
.ком, etc
.ком is one of 11 internationalized domain name transliterations of .com — .कॉम, .ком, .点看, .คอม, .नेट, .닷컴, .大拿, .닷넷, .コム, .كوم and .קוֹם — that Verisign had delegated back in 2015. To date, only the Japanese .コム has launched, and the registry reportedly arsed it up quite badly. Records show .コム peaked at over 28,000 names and sits at fewer than 7,000 today. None of the remaining IDNs have launch dates attached.
Anything owned by Google or Amazon
When it comes to sitting on dormant gTLDs, you can’t top Google and Amazon for sheer numbers. Google has 19 strings in pre-launch states right now, while Amazon has a whopping 34. Amazon is letting the likes of .free, .wow, .now, .deal, .save and .secure sit idle, while Google is still stroking its chin on the likes of .eat, .meme, .fly and .channel. At the snail’s pace these companies roll out gTLDs, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these strings never hit the market.
.bom
Portuguese for “.good”, .bom was delegated to local ccTLD registry Nic.br in 2015 but has no published launch dates and no content on its nic.bom registry web site. I’d say more, but I expect a certain prolific DI commenter could do a better job of it, so I’ll turn it over to him…

EnCirca partners with PandoraBots to push .bot names to brands

Specialist registrar EnCirca has partnered with bot development framework vendor PandoraBots to market .bot domains at big brands.
The two companies are pushing their wares jointly at this week’s International Trademark Association annual meeting in Seattle.
In a press release, the companies said that PandoraBots is offering bot-creation “starter kits” for brand owners that tie in with .bot registration via EnCirca.
Bots are rudimentary artificial intelligences that can be tailored to answer customer support questions over social media. Because who wants to pay a human to answer the phones?
Amazon Registry’s .bot gTLD is a tightly restricted space with strict preregistration verification rules.
Basically, you have to have a live, functioning bot before you can even request a domain there.
Only bots created using Amazon Lex, Botkit Studio, Dialogflow, Gupshup, Microsoft Bot Framework, and Pandorabots are currently eligible, though Amazon occasionally updates its list of approved frameworks.
The .bot space has been in a limited registration period all year, but on May 31 it will enter a six-month sunrise period.
Despite not hitting general availability until November, it already has about close to 1,800 domains in its zone — most of which were registered via EnCirca — and hundreds of live sites.
EnCirca currently offers a $200 registration service for brand owners, in which the registrar handles eligibility for $125 and the first year reg for $75.

Amazon’s .amazon gTLD may not be dead just yet

South American governments are discussing whether to reverse their collective objection to Amazon’s .amazon gTLD bid.
A meeting of the Governmental Advisory Committee at ICANN 61 in Puerto Rico yesterday heard that an analysis of Amazon’s proposal to protect sensitive names if it gets .amazon will be passed to governments for approval no later than mid-April.
Brazil’s GAC rep said that a working group of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization is currently carrying out this analysis.
Amazon has offered the eight ACTO countries commitments including the protection of such as “rainforest.amazon” and actively supporting any future government-endorsed bids for .amazonas.
Its offer was apparently sweetened in some unspecified way recently, judging by Brazil’s comments.
ACTO countries, largely Brazil and Peru, currently object to .amazon on the grounds that it’s a clash with the English version of the name for the massive South American rain forest, river and basin region, known locally as Amazonas.
There’s no way to read the tea leaves on which way the governments will lean on Amazon’s latest proposal, and Peru’s GAC rep warned against reading too much into the fact that it’s being considered by the ACTO countries.
“I would like to stress the fact that we are not negotiating right now,” she told the GAC meeting. “We are simply analyzing a proposal… The word ‘progress’ by no means should be interpreted as favorable opinion towards the proposal, or a negative opinion. We are simply analyzing the proposal.”
ICANN’s board of directors has formally asked the GAC to give it more information about its original objection to .amazon, which basically killed off the application a few years ago, by the end of ICANN 61.
Currently, the GAC seems to be planning to say it has nothing to offer, though it may possibly highlight the existence of the ACTO talks, in its formal advice later this week.

ICANN chief to lead talks over blocked .amazon gTLD

ICANN CEO Goran Marby has been asked to help Amazon come to terms with several South American governments over its controversial bid for the .amazon gTLD.
The organization’s board of directors passed a resolution last week accepting the suggestion, which came from the Governmental Advisory Committee. The board said:

The ICANN Board accepts the GAC advice and has asked the ICANN org President and CEO to facilitate negotiations between the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization’s (ACTO) member states and the Amazon corporation

Governments, prominently Peru and Brazil, have strongly objected to .amazon on the grounds that the “Amazon” river and rain-forest region, known locally as “Amazonas” should be a protected geographic term.
Amazon’s applications for .amazon and two Asian-script translations were rejected a few years ago after the GAC sided with its South American members and filed advice objecting to the gTLDs.
A subsequent Independent Review Process panel last year found that ICANN had given far too much deference to the GAC advice, which came with little to no evidence-based justification.
The panel told ICANN to “promptly” take another look at the applications and “make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications”.
Despite this, the .amazon application is still classified as “Will Not Proceed” on ICANN’s web site. That’s basically another way of saying “rejected” or “denied”.
Amazon the company has promised to protect key domains, such as “rainforest.amazon”, if it gets to run the gTLDs. Governments would get to help create a list of reserved, sensitive domains.
It’s also promised to actively support any future bids for .amazonas supported by the governments concerned.
.amazon would be a dot-brand, so only Amazon would be able to register names there.

.kids auction is off

ICANN has postponed the planned auction of the .kid(s) gTLDs after an appeal from one of the applicants.
The last-resort auction had been penciled in for January 25, and there was a December 8 deadline for the three participants to submit their info to the auctioneer.
But DotKids Foundation, the shallowest-pocketed of the three, filed a Request for Reconsideration last Wednesday, asking ICANN to put the contention set back on hold.
The cancellation of the January auction appears to be to give ICANN’s board of directors time to consider the RfR under its usual process — it has not yet ruled on it.
DotKids and Amazon have applied for .kids and Google has applied for .kid. A String Confusion Objection won by Google put the two strings in the same contention set, meaning only one will eventually go live.
DotKids comprehensively lost a Community Priority Evaluation, which would negate an auction altogether, but it thinks the CPE got it wrong and wants to be treated the same way as other gTLD applicants whose CPE results are currently under review.
Reconsideration requests take between 30 and 90 days to process, and they rarely go the way of the requester, so the delay to the auction will likely not be too long.

DotKids doesn’t want .kids auction to go ahead

One of the applicants for the .kids gTLD has asked ICANN to stop the planned last-resort auction.
DotKids Foundation is competing with Amazon for .kids and, because the two strings were ruled confusingly similar, with Google’s application for the singular .kid.
ICANN last month set a January 25 date for the three contenders to go to auction, having unfrozen DotKids’ application back in October.
DotKids’ bid had been put on hold due to it losing a Community Priority Evaluation — which found overwhelmingly that the organization did not represent a proper community — and its subsequent appeals of that ruling.
But the foundation now says that its application should be treated the same as .music, .gay, and a few others, which are currently on hold while ICANN waits for the results of a third-party review of the CPE process.
DotKids filed a Request for Reconsideration (pdf) with ICANN yesterday, immediately after being told that there were no plans to put the contention set back on hold.
Tomorrow is the deadline for the three applicants to submit their information to ICANN to participate in next month’s auction.
An ICANN last-resort auction sees the winning bid being placed in a fund for a yet-to-be-determined purpose, as opposed to private auctions where the losing bidders share the loot.

Amazon and Google to fight over .kids at auction

Amazon, Google and a third applicant are scheduled to fight for control of the new gTLDs .kid or .kids at auction.
It’s the first ICANN gTLD auction to be scheduled since a Verisign puppet paid $135 million for .web in July 2016.
According to ICANN documentation, .kid and .kids will go to auction January 25, 2018.
The winning bid will be added to ICANN’s quarter-billion-dollar stash of auction proceeds, rather than shared out between the applicants.
Even though two different strings are at stake, it will be a so-called “direct contention” auction, meaning only .kids or .kid will ultimately go live.
Google, the sole applicant for .kid, had filed String Confusion Objections against .kids applications from Amazon and DotKids Foundation and won both, meaning the three applications were lumped into the same contention set.
Unless DotKids has a secret sugar daddy, it seems probable that the internet will next year either get a .kid gTLD operated by Google or a .kids gTLD operated by Amazon.
DotKids had applied as a “community” application and attempted to shut out both rivals and avoid an auction by requesting a Community Priority Evaluation.
However, it comprehensively lost the CPE.
Child-friendly domain spaces have a poor track record, partly due to the extra restrictions registrants must agree to, and are unlikely to be high-volume gTLDS no matter who wins.
Neustar operated .kids.us for 10 years, following US legislation, but turned it off in 2012 after fewer than 100 web sites used the domain. It made the decision not to reintroduce it in 2015.
The Russian-language equivalent, .дети, has been live for over three years but has only around 1,000 domains in its zone file.
The .kids/.kid auction may not go ahead if the three applicants privately negotiate a deal soon, but they’ve had over a year to do so already and have apparently failed to come to an agreement.

“We own your name” government tells Amazon in explosive slapdown

Amazon suffered a blistering attack from South American governments over its controversial .amazon gTLD applications this weekend.
A Peruvian official today excoriated Amazon’s latest peace offering, telling the tech giant in no uncertain terms that the word “Amazon” is not its property and demanding an apology for the company’s alleged behavior during recent legal proceedings.
“We will be giving you permission to use a certain word, not the other way around,” she said. “We are the owners of the Amazonian region.”
Speaking for almost 10 minutes during a session at the ICANN 60 meeting in Abu Dhabi this afternoon, Peru’s representative to the Governmental Advisory Committee pulled rank and scolded Amazon like a naughty schoolchild.
She claimed that Amazon had been bad-mouthing Peru by saying former GAC reps had “lied to and manipulated” the rest of the GAC in order to get support for its objection. She then demanded an apology from the company for this.
She was speaking in support of the idea that the string “Amazon” belongs to the people of the Amazonas region, which covers as many as eight South American countries, rather than the American company, despite the fact that none of those countries use the English word to describe the region.
Her remarks drew applause from parts of the audience.
Amazon had showed up at the session — described by two GAC reps later as a “lion’s den” — to offer a “strong, agreed-upon compromise that addresses the needs of the governments”.
The proposed deal would see the GAC drop its objections to .amazon in exchange for certain safeguards.
Amazon is promising to reserve geographically and culturally sensitive words at the second level in .amazon.
The domain rainforest.amazon, its associate general counsel Dana Northcott said by way of example, would be never be used by anyone.
Affected governments would get to negotiate a list of such terms before .amazon went live and there’d be an ongoing consultation process for more such terms to be protected in future.
The company has also promised not to object to — and in fact to actively support with hard resources — any future applications for .amazonas or other local-language variants by the people of the region.
But Peru was not impressed, telling the company that not only is the English version of the name of the region not its property but also that it must show more respect to governments.
“No government is going to accept any impositions from you,” she said, before appealing to fellow GAC members that the issue represents a kind of existential threat.
“The core issue here… is our survival as governments in this pseudo-multi-stakeholder space that has been invented,” she said.
“They want us to believe this is a place where we have dignity but that is increasingly obvious that this is not the case,” she said. “We don’t have it. And that is because of companies like yours… Companies that persist in not respecting the governments and the people they represent.”
The Peruvian GAC rep, listed on the GAC web site as María Milagros Castañon Seoane but addressed only as “Peru” during the session, spoke in Spanish; I’ve been quoting the live interpretation provided by ICANN.
Her remarks, in my opinion, were at least partially an attempt to strengthen her side’s negotiating hand after an Independent Review Process panel this July spanked ICANN for giving too much deference to GAC advice.
The IRP panel decided that ICANN had killed the .amazon applications — in breach of its bylaws — due to a GAC objection that appeared on the face of the public record to be based on little more than governmental whim.
The panel essentially highlighted a clash between ICANN’s bylaws commitments to fairness and transparency and the fact that its New gTLD Applicant Guidebook rules gave the GAC a veto over any application for any reason with no obligation to explain itself.
It told ICANN to reopen the applications for consideration and “make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications”.
That was back in July. Earlier today, the ICANN board of directors in response to the IRP passed a resolution calling for the GAC to explain itself before ICANN 61 in March next year, resolving in part:

Resolved (2017.10.29.02), the Board asks the GAC if it has: (i) any information to provide to the Board as it relates to the “merits-based public policy reasons,” regarding the GAC’s advice that the Amazon applications should not proceed; or (ii) any other new or additional information to provide to the Board regarding the GAC’s advice that the Amazon applications should not proceed.

Other governments speaking today expressed doubt about whether the IRP ruling should have any jurisdiction over such GAC advice.
“It is not for any panelist to decided what is public policy, it is for the governments to decide,” Iran’s Kavouss Arasteh said.
During a later session today the GAC, talking among itself, made little progress in deciding how to formally respond to the ICANN board’s resolution.
A session between the GAC and the ICANN board on Tuesday is expected to be the next time the issue raises its increasingly ugly head.