Argentina will use a lottery to decide 2LD landrush
Argentina has become the latest country to allow its ccTLD registrants to register domains at the second level.
NIC Argentina announced last week that in addition to third-level domains such as example.com.ar and example.net.ar, you’ll be able to buy example.ar too.
While it’s following in the footsteps of the likes of .uk and .nz (and soon .au), Argentina is taking a slightly different approach to grandfathering and conflicts.
First, the priority registration period is pretty short, at least compared to the five years .uk registrants got.
If you already own a .ar 3LD, you only have until November 9 to get your application in for the matching 2LD.
In the event that more than one application is received from eligible registrants, the winner won’t be decided by auction, but by lottery.
The City of Buenos Aires Lottery will conduct the raffle, randomly assigning priority numbers to applicants to determine who gets first dibs on their domain of choice.
It’s the first time I’ve seen a domain contest settled by lottery since the process ICANN used to assign priorities to new gTLD applicants back in 2012.
From November 25 until January 23, the .ar process will enter a landrush phase, during which anyone can apply for any available 2LD they want by paying a non-refundable application fee.
The fee is ARS 200, the Argentine peso equivalent of $3.50, so the registry can hardly be accused of greed.
Again, competing bids will be settled by the same lottery process, with the winner having to pay the standard ARS 340 registration fee (the equivalent of $6) to claim their domain.
After February 23, it’s open season, with every domain in general availability.
.ar currently has just shy of half a million domains under management, and hasn’t seen any significant growth in a couple of years.
It will be interesting to see how popular the 2LD offer is, and what impact it has on domain growth in the industry overall.
Argentina allows .ar registrations from non-residents, but it does not appear to be a simple process.
The .patagonia problem
Argentina has escalated its complaint with ICANN about the new gTLD application for .patagonia.
Ambassador Alfredo Morelli of the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has written to ICANN’s leadership to let them know that .patagonia “should not be used as a closed brand gTLD”.
An American clothing company that goes by the name of Patagonia Inc has applied for .patagonia, which it intends to use as a dot-brand, but Patagonia is also a region of South America.
Argentina’s Governmental Advisory Committee representative told ICANN’s board in Prague this June that the government would not stand for a geographic term for part of its country being used in this way.
But Argentina has a problem.
The new gTLD program rules, as spelled out in the Applicant Guidebook, give special protection to geographic strings, but only if they appear on certain lists.
Rather than create its own list of geographic strings, ICANN instead deferred to established international standards, such as ISO 3166.
Patagonia, as far as I can tell, does not appear on any of these lists. (The DI PRO database compares all applied-for strings against protected geographic names.)
While it’s undoubtedly the name of a region, covering parts of Argentina and Chile, it does not appear to be the name of the kind of administrative division covered by ISO 3166-2.
Judging by the Applicant Guidebook, ICANN’s Geographic Names Panel would therefore not designate .patagonia as geographic and the applicant would not have to secure government support for its bid.
It’s not clear from the Guidebook how much flexibility, if any, the panel will get to make subjective decisions with edge cases like this.
However, so much of the program that had been thought finalized is today apparently still open for negotiation that I wouldn’t be surprised if the rules are changed or reinterpreted.
While the .patagonia application has so far attracted almost 300 negative comments from internet users, it is not the only dot-brand to ruffle feathers in Argentina.
There has been a smaller outcry over the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s application for .cba, which apparently matches the abbreviation of the Argentinian Province of Cordoba.
The string “CBA” does not appear to be protected by the Applicant Guidebook either, and I’ve not seen any official concerns raised by governments yet.
I think there’s a strong chance the .patagonia application is dead, even if it is not officially deemed geographic.
The GAC will almost certainly object, and even if the objection does not have consensus the ICANN board will have a big reason to reject the bid.
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