.gay, .music and others in limbo as ICANN probes itself

Several new gTLD applicants have slammed ICANN for conducting an investigation into its own controversial practices that seems to be as opaque as the practices themselves.
Seven proposed new gTLDs, including the much-anticipated .music and .gay, are currently trapped in ICANN red tape hell as the organization conducts a secretive probe into how its own staff handled Community Priority Evaluations.
The now broad-ranging investigation seems have been going on for over six months but does not appear to have a set deadline for completion.
Applicants affected by the delays don’t know who is conducting the probe, and say they have not been contacted by anyone for their input.
At issue is the CPE process, designed to give genuine “community” gTLD applicants a way to avoid a costly auction in the event that their choice of string was contested.
The results of the roughly 25 CPE decisions, all conducted by the independent Economist Intelligence Unit, were sometimes divergent from each other or just baffling.
Many of the losers complained via ICANN’s in-house Requests for Reconsideration and then Independent Review Process mechanisms.
One such IRP complaint — related to Dot Registry’s .inc, .llc, .llp applications — led to two of the three-person IRP panel deciding last July that ICANN had serious questions to answer about how the CPE process was carried out.
While no evidence was found that ICANN had coached the EIU on scoring, it did emerge that ICANN staff had supplied margin notes to the supposedly independent EIU that had subsequently been incorporated into its final decision.
The IRP panel majority wrote that the EIU “did not act on its own in performing the CPEs” and “ICANN staff was intimately involved in the process”.
A month or so later, the ICANN board of directors passed a resolution calling for the CEO to “undertake an independent review of the process by which ICANN staff interacted with the CPE provider”.
Another month later, in October, the Board Governance Committee broadened the scope of the investigation and asked the EIU to supply it with documents it used to reach its decisions in multiple controversial CPE cases.
A couple of weeks ago, BGC chair Chris Disspain explained all this (pdf) to the applicants for .music, .gay, hotel, .cpa, .llc, .inc, .llp and .merck, all of which are affected by the delay caused by the investigation.
He said that the investigation would be completed “as soon as practicable”.
But in response, Dot Registry and lawyers for fellow failed CPE applicant DotMusic have fired off more letters of complaint to ICANN.
(UPDATE: Dot Registry CEO Shaul Jolles got in touch to say his letter was actually sent before Disspain’s, despite the dates on the letters as published by ICANN suggesting the opposite).
Both applicants note that they have no idea who the independent party investigating the CPEs is. That’s because ICANN hasn’t identified them publicly or privately, and the evaluator has not contacted the applicants for their side of the story.
DotMusic’s lawyer wrote (pdf):

DotMusic’s rights are thus being decided by a process about which it: (1) possesses minimal information; (2) carried out by an individual or organization whose identity ICANN is shielding; (3) whose mandate is secret; (4) whose methods are unknown; and (5) whose report may never be made public by ICANN’s Board.

He added, pointedly:

The exclusion of directly affected parties from participation eerily reproduces the shortcomings of the EIU evaluations that are under scrutiny in the first place.

Dot Registry CEO Shaul Jolles, in his letter (pdf), quoted Disspain saying at a public forum in Copenhagen this March that a blog post addressing the concerns had been drafted and would be published “shortly”, but wasn’t.
He suggested the investigation is “smoke and mirrors” and, along with DotMusic, demanded more information about the investigator’s identity and methods.
It does strike me as a looking a bit like history repeating itself: ICANN comes under fire for non-transparently influencing a supposedly independent review and addresses those criticisms by launching another non-transparent supposedly independent review.
No matter what I feel about the merits of the “community” claims of some of these applicants, it has been over five years now since they submitted their applications and the courtesy of transparency — if closure itself its not yet possible — doesn’t seem like a great deal to ask.

.hotel losers gang up to threaten ICANN with legal bills

The six losing applicants for the .hotel new gTLD are collectively threatening ICANN with a second Independent Review Process action.
Together, they this week filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN, challenging its decision earlier this month to allow the Afilias-owned Hotel Top Level Domain Sarl application to go ahead to contracting.
HTLD won a controversial Community Priority Evaluation in 2014, effectively eliminating all rival applicants, but that decision was challenged in an IRP that ICANN ultimately won.
The other applicants think HTLD basically cobbled together a bogus “community” in order to “game” the CPE process and avoid an expensive auction.
Since the IRP decision, the six other applicants — Travel Reservations, Famous Four Media, Radix, Minds + Machines, Donuts and Fegistry — have been arguing that the HTLD application should be thrown out due to the actions of Dirk Krischenowski, a former key executive.
Krischenowski was found by ICANN to have exploited a misconfiguration in its own applicants’ portal to download documents belonging to its competitors that should have been confidential.
But at its August 9 meeting, the ICANN board noted that the timing of the downloads showed that HTLD could not have benefited from the data exposure, and that in any event Krischenowski is no longer involved in the company, and allowed the bid to proceed.
That meant the six other applicants lost the chance to win .hotel at auction and/or make a bunch of cash by losing the auction. They’re not happy about that.
It doesn’t matter that the data breach could not have aided HTLD’s application or its CPE case, they argue, the information revealed could prove a competitive advantage once .hotel goes on sale:

What matters is that the information was accessed with the obvious intent to obtain an unfair advantage over direct competitors. The future registry operator of the .hotel gTLD will compete with other registry operators. In the unlikely event that HTLD were allowed to operate the .hotel gTLD, HTLD would have an unfair advantage over competing registry operators, because of its access to sensitive business information

They also think that HTLD being given .hotel despite having been found “cheating” goes against the spirit of application rules and ICANN’s bylaws.
The RfR (pdf) also draws heavily on the findings of the IRP panel in the unrelated Dot Registry (.llc, .inc, etc) case, which were accepted by the ICANN board also on August 9.
In that case, the panel suggested that the board should conduct more thorough, meaningful reviews of CPE decisions.
It also found that ICANN staff had been “intimately involved” in the preparation of the Dot Registry CPE decision (though not, it should be noted, in the actual scoring) as drafted by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The .hotel applicants argue that this decision is incompatible with their own IRP, which they lost in February, where the judges found a greater degree of separation between ICANN and the EIU.
Their own IRP panel was given “incomplete and misleading information” about how closely ICANN and the EIU work together, they argue, bringing the decision into doubt.
The RfR strongly hints that another IRP could be in the offing if ICANN fails to cancel HTLD application.
The applicants also want a hearing so they can argue their case in person, and a “substantive review” of the .hotel CPE.
The HTLD application for .hotel is currently “On Hold” while ICANN sorts through the mess.

Afilias set to get .hotel despite hacking claims

Afilias is back on the path to becoming the registry for .hotel, after ICANN decided claims of hacking by a former employee of the applicant did not warrant a rejection.
The ICANN board of directors decided last week that HOTEL Top-Level Domain Sarl, which was recently taken over by Afilias, did not gain any benefit when employee Dirk Krischenowski accessed competing applicants’ confidential documents via an ICANN web site.
Because HTLD had won a Community Priority Evaluation, it should now proceed to contracting, barring any further action from the other six applicants.
ICANN’s board said in its August 9 decision:

ICANN has not uncovered any evidence that: (i) the information Mr. Krischenowski may have obtained as a result of the portal issue was used to support HTLD’s application for .HOTEL; or (ii) any information obtained by Mr. Krischenowski enabled HTLD’s application to prevail in CPE.

It authorized ICANN staff to carry on processing the HTLD application.
The other applicants — Travel Reservations, Famous Four Media, Radix, Minds + Machines, Donuts and Fegistry — had called on ICANN in April to throw out the application, saying that to decline to do so would amount to “acquiescence in criminal acts”.
That’s because an ICANN investigation had discovered that Dirk Krischenowski, who ran a company with an almost 50% stake in HTLD, had downloaded hundreds of confidential documents belonging to competitors.
He did so via ICANN’s new gTLD applicants’ portal, which had been misconfigured to enable anyone to view any attachment from any application.
Krischenowski has consistently denied any wrongdoing, telling DI a few months ago that he simply used the tool that ICANN made available with the understanding that it was working as intended.
ICANN has now decided that because the unauthorized access incidents took place after HTLD had already submitted its CPE application, it could not have gained any benefit from whatever data Krischenowski managed to pull.
The board reasoned:

his searches relating to the .HOTEL Claimants did not occur until 27 March, 29 March and 11 April 2014. Therefore, even assuming that Mr. Krischenowski did obtain confidential information belonging to the .HOTEL Claimants, this would not have had any impact on the CPE process for HTLD’s .HOTEL application. Specifically, whether HTLD’s application met the CPE criteria was based upon the application as submitted in May 2012, or when the last documents amending the application were uploaded by HTLD on 30 August 2013 – all of which occurred before Mr. Krischenowski or his associates accessed any confidential information, which occurred from March 2014 through October 2014. In addition, there is no evidence, or claim by the .HOTEL Claimants, that the CPE Panel had any interaction at all with Mr. Krischenowski or HTLD during the CPE process, which began on 19 February 2014.

The HTLD/Afilias .hotel application is currently still listed on ICANN’s web site as “On Hold” while its rivals are still classified as “Will Not Proceed”.
It might be worth noting here — to people who say ICANN always tries to force contention sets to auction so it possibly makes a bit of cash — that this is an instance of it not doing so.

Afilias takes over .hotel, sidelines Krischenowski over hacking claims

Afilias has sought to distance itself from DotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski, due to ongoing claims that he improperly accessed secret data on rival .hotel applicants.
The company revealed in a recent letter to ICANN that it has bought out Krischenowski’s 48.8% stake in successful .hotel applicant Hotel Top Level Domain Sarl and that Afilias will become the sole shareholder of HTLD.
The move is linked to claims that Krischenowski exploited a glitch in ICANN’s new gTLD applicants’ portal to access confidential financial and technical information belonging to rival .hotel applicants.
These competing applicants have ganged up to demand that HTLD should lose its rights to .hotel, which it obtained by winning a controversial Community Priority Evaluation.
Afilias chairman Philipp Grabensee, now “sole managing director” of HTLD, wrote ICANN last month (pdf) to explain the nature of the HTLD’s relationship with Krischenowski and deny that HTLD had benefited from the alleged data compromise.
He said that, at the time of the incidents, Krischenowski was the 50% owner and managing director of a German company that in turn was a 48.8% owner of HTLD. He was also an HTLD consultant, though Grabensee played down that role.
He was responding to a March ICANN letter (pdf) which claimed that Krischenowski’s portal credentials were used at least eight times to access confidential data on .hotel bids. It said:

It appears that Mr Krischenowski accessed and downloaded, at minimum, the financial projections for Despegar’s applications for .HOTEL, .HOTEIS and .HOTELES, and the technical overview for Despegar’s applications for .HOTEIS and .HOTEL. Mr Krischenowski appears to have specifically searched for terms and question types related to financial or technical portions of the application.

Krischenowski has denied any wrongdoing and told DI last month that he simply used the portal assuming it was functioning as intended.
Grabensee said in his letter that any data Krischenowski may have obtained was not given to HTLD, and that his alleged actions were not done with HTLD’s knowledge or consent.
He added that obtaining the data would not have helped HTLD’s application anyway, given that the incident took place after HTLD had already submitted its application. HTLD did not substantially alter its application after the incident, he said.
HTLD’s rival .hotel applicants do not seem to have alleged that HTLD won the contention set due to the confidential data.
Rather, they’ve said via their lawyer that HTLD should be disqualified on the grounds that new gTLD program rules disqualify people who have been convicted of computer crime.
Even that’s a bit tenuous, however, given that Krischenowski has not been convicted of, or even charged with, a computer crime.
The other .hotel applicants are Travel Reservations, Famous Four Media, Radix, Minds + Machines, Donuts and Fegistry.
ICANN is now pressing HTLD for more specific information about Krischenowski’s relationship with HTLD at specific times over the last few years, in a letter (pdf) published last night, so it appears that its overdue investigation is not yet complete.

.hotel fight gets nasty with “criminal” hacking claims

A group of would-be .hotel gTLD registries have called on ICANN to reject the winning applicant’s bid or be complicit in “criminal acts”.
The group, which includes Travel Reservations, Famous Four Media, Radix, Minds + Machines, Donuts and Fegistry is threatening to file a second Independent Review Process complaint unless ICANN complies with its demands.
Six applicants, represented by Flip Petillion of Crowell & Moring, claim that Hotel Top Level Domain Sarl should forfeit its application because one of its representatives gained unauthorized access to their trade secrets.
That’s a reference to a story we covered extensively last year, where an ICANN audit found that DotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski, or at least somebody using his credentials, had accessed hundreds of supposedly confidential gTLD application documents on ICANN’s web site.
Krischenowski, who has denied any wrongdoing, is also involved with HTLD, though in what capacity appears to be a matter of dispute between ICANN and the rival .hotel applicants.
In a month-old letter (pdf) to ICANN, only published at the weekend, Petillion doesn’t pull many punches.
The letter alleges:

Allowing HTLD’s application to proceed would go agaist everthing that ICANN stands for. It would amount to an acquiescence in criminal acts that were committed with the obvious intent to obtain an unfair advantage over direct competitors.
…
ICANN caught a representative of HTLD stealing trade secrets of competing applicants via the use of computers and the internet. The situation is even more critical as the crime was committed with the obvious intent of obtaining sensitive business information concerning a competing applicant.

It points out that ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook disqualifies people from applying for a new gTLD if they’ve been convicted of a computer crime.
To the best of my knowledge Krischenowski has not been convicted of, or even charged with, any computer crime.
What ICANN says he did was use its new gTLD applicants’ customer service portal to search for documents which, due to a dumb misconfiguration by ICANN, were visible to users other than their owners.
Krischenowski told DI in an emailed statement today:

According to ICANN, the failure in ICANN’s CSC and GDD portals was the result of a misconfiguration by ICANN of the software used (as mentioned at https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2015-11-19-en). As a user, I relied on the proper functioning of ICANN’s technical infrastructure while working with ICANN’s CSC portal.

HTLD’s application for .hotel is currently “On Hold”, though it is technically the winner of the seven-application contention set.
It prevailed after winning a controversial Community Priority Evaluation in 2014, which was then challenged in an Independent Review Process case by the applicants Petillion represents.
They lost the IRP, but the IRP panelists said that ICANN’s failure to be transparent about its investigation into Krischenowski could amount to a breach of its bylaws.
In its February ruling, the IRP panel wrote:

It is not clear if ICANN has properly investigated the allegation of association between HTLD and D. Krischenowski and, if it has, what conclusions it has reached. Openness and transparency, in the light of such serious allegations, require that it should, and that it should make public the fact of the investigation and the result thereof.

The ruling seems to envisage the possibility of a follow-up IRP.
ICANN had told the panel that its investigation was not complete, so its failure to act to date could not be considered inaction.
The ICANN board resolved in March, two days after Petillion’s letter was sent, to “complete the investigation” and “provide a report to the Board for consideration”.
While the complaining applicants want information about this investigation, their clear preference appears to be that the HTLD application be thrown out.

.hotel avoids auction with CPE win

A new gTLD applicant backed by the hotel industry has won a Community Priority Evaluation, meaning it gets to automatically win the .hotel contention set without going to auction.
If the decision stands, no fewer than six rival applicants for the string — including the likes of Donuts, Radix, Famous Four and Minds + Machines — are going to have to withdraw their applications.
It’s a bit of a shocker.
The CPE winner is HOTEL Top-Level-Domain, which scored 15 out of 16 available points in the CPE. The minimum required to vanquish all foes is 14 points.
The company will have spent a fair bit of cash fighting the CPE, but nothing compared to the millions of dollars an auction for .hotel would be likely to fetch.
Crucially, where HOTEL prevailed was on the “Nexus” criterion — demonstrating a link between the string and the community supporting the application — where four points are available.
In the first four CPE results to come through, back in March, each applicant scored a 0 on Nexus and none scored more than 11 points overall.
Dot Registry, which failed four CPEs (.inc, .llc, .corp and .llp) this week, also repeatedly flunked on this count.
HOTEL, however, scored a 3.
Rival applicants such as Donuts and M+M had argued that HOTEL’s stated community failed to take into account smaller hoteliers, such as bed and breakfast owners.
But the CPE panelist decided that the application did not “substantially overreach”:

The string nexus closely describes the community, without overreaching substantially beyond the community. The string identifies the name of the core community members (i.e. hotels and associations representing hotels). However, the community also includes some entities that are related to hotels, such as hotel marketing associations that represent hotels and hotel chains and which may not be automatically associated with the gTLD. However, these entities are considered to comprise only a small part of the community. Therefore, the string identifies the community, but does not over-reach substantially beyond the community, as the general public will generally associate the string with the community as defined by the applicant.

There’s no formal appeals mechanism for CPE, but rival applicants could try their luck with more general ICANN procedures such as Requests for Reconsideration.
HOTEL Top-Level-Domain is a Luxembourg-based entity, founded in 2008 to apply for the gTLD, backed by about a dozen international hotelier associations, including the International Hotel and Restaurant Association.
The IHRA counts 50 major hotel chain brands among its members and claims to be officially recognized by the UN for its lobbying work on behalf of the hospitality industry.
HOTEL intends to keep the .hotel gTLD restricted “initially” to only hotels as defined in the international standard ISO 18513.
Registrants will be verified against hotel industry databases. This will happen post-registration, but before the domain name can be activated in the DNS.
In other words, unless you’re a member of the hotel industry, you won’t be getting to use a .hotel domain name. Domainers are apparently not wanted.
All .hotel names will also be checked a year from registration to ensure that they have a web site displaying relevant content. Redirection to other TLDs may be allowed.
I was so convinced that the CPE was designed in such a way that it would be failed by all the applicants which had applied for it, I bet $50 (to go to an applicant-nominated charity) that none would.
If HOTEL wants to let me know which charity they want the $50 to go to, I’ll get it donated forthwith. I’m just glad I didn’t offer to eat my underwear.

Big hotel chains pick a side in .hotel gTLD fight

Many of the world’s major hotel chains say they plan to object to every .hotel new gTLD application but one.
A coalition of many recognizable hotel brands, led by InterContinental, has filed comments against six of the seven .hotel applications, as well as the applications for .hotels, .hoteis and .hoteles.
They say they want the Independent Objector to object to these applications on community grounds. Failing that, they’ll file their own official Community Objections.
The comments (PRO) were filed by the Hotel Consumer Protection Coalition, which appears to be one of those ad hoc organizations that exists purely to send letters to ICANN.

HCPC encourages the Independent Evaluator to submit a formal Community Objection if necessary. (Guidebook, Sec. 3.2.5.) Failing either of these occurrences, HCPC will seriously consider filing a Community Objection of its own – unless, of course, Applicant voluntarily withdraws its application.

The coalition’s members include the Choice Hotels, InterContinental, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Starwood and Wyndham hotel chains. Together, they say they have over 25,000 hotels in over 100 countries.
The lucky recipient of the coalition’s tacit support is HOTEL Top-Level-Domain, the Luxembourg-based applicant managed by Johannes Lenz-Hawliczek and Katrin Ohlmer, which is using Afilias as its back-end.
It’s one of only two .hotel applicants flagged in the DI PRO database as planning to use a “restricted” business model. Only hotels, hotel chains and hotel associations will be able to register.
The other applicant with planned restrictions is a subsidiary of Directi, though its application suggests that any eligibility requirements would only be enforced post-registration.
HOTEL Top-Level Domain is also the only applicant that appears to be pursuing a single gTLD. All but one of the others are portfolio applicants of various ambitions.
Top Level Domain Holdings, Donuts, Famous Four Media and Fegistry all plan “open” business models for .hotel, while Despegar Online is planning a single-registrant space.
The Hotel Consumer Protection Coalition’s support for HOTEL Top-Level Domain is conditional, however. The company has apparently had to agree to explicitly exclude:

“any entity other than a hotel, hotel chain, or organization or association that is not formed or controlled by individual hotels or hotel chains”

It’s also agreed to “immediately suspend” any “clear violations”, such as cases of cybersquatting, when notified by coalition members, and to include its members’ brands on a Globally Protected Hotel Marks List.
The support has apparently been granted extremely reluctantly. InterContinental explicitly does not support the new gTLD program, and Marriott has previously said it thinks .hotel is pointless.
I can’t imagine a .hotel supported by companies that have no plans to use it being particularly successful.

TLDH applies for 92 gTLDs, 68 for itself

Top Level Domain Holdings is involved in a grand total of 92 new generic top-level domain applications, many of them already known to be contested.
Sixty-eight applications are being filed on its own behalf, six have been submitted via joint ventures, and 18 more have been submitted on behalf of Minds + Machines clients.
Here’s the list of its own applications:

.abogado (Spanish for .lawyer), .app, .art, .baby, .beauty, .beer, .blog, .book, .casa (Spanish for .home), .cloud, .cooking, .country, .coupon, .cpa, .cricket, .data, .dds, .deals, .design, .dog, .eco, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .flowers, .free, .garden, .gay, .green, .guide, .home, .horse, .hotel, .immo, .inc, .latino, .law, .lawyer, .llc, .love, .luxe, .pizza, .property, .realestate, .restaurant, .review, .rodeo, .roma, .sale, .school, .science, .site, .soccer, .spa, .store, .style, .surf, .tech, .video, .vip, .vodka, .website, .wedding, .work, .yoga, .zulu, 网址 (.site in Chinese), 购物 (.shopping in Chinese).

There’s a lot to note in that list.
First, it’s interesting to see that TLDH is hedging its bets on the environmental front, applying for both .eco (which we’ve known about for years) and .green.
This puts it into contention with the longstanding Neustar-backed DotGreen bid, and possibly others we don’t yet know about, which should make for some interesting negotiations.
Also, both of TLDH’s previously announced Indian city gTLDs, .mumbai and .bangaluru, seem to have fallen through, as suspected.
Other contention sets TLDH is now confirmed to be involved in include: .blog, .site, .immo, .hotel, .home, .casa, .love, .law, .cloud, .baby, .art, .gay, .style and .store.
The company said in a statement:

During the next six months, TLDH will focus its efforts on marketing and operations for geographic names such as dot London and dot Bayern where it has the exclusive support of the relevant governing authority, as well as any other gTLDs that TLDH has filed for that are confirmed to be uncontested on the Reveal Date. Discussions with other applicants regarding contested names will be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Directi expects all 31 of its gTLDs to be contested

Directi has applied for 31 new top-level domains and expects all 31 of them to be contested, according to CEO Bhavin Turakhia.
The company has budgeted $30 million for its unashamedly mainstream portfolio of applications – which includes the likes of .web – but that’s not including what it expects to spend at auction.
“I expect there to be contention in all of them,” he said. “Whether they will end up going to auction… we’re completely open to strategic partnerships with other industry players who we believe can add value and join hands with us, based on merit. We’ll be evaluating this on a case by case basis.”
“Something like a .web, there’ll be enough competitors out there that it will certainly go to auction, no matter what,” he said, adding that he expects at least 10 rivals for .web.
Directi has applied for: .web, .shop, .bank, .law, .music, .news, .blog, .movie, .baby, .store, .doctor, .hotel, .play, .home .site, .website, .click, .online, .one, .ping, .space, .world, .press, .chat, .city, .deals, .insurance .loans, .app, .host, and .hosting.
The company is applying via its new business unit, Radix, using ARI Registry Services as its back-end registry provider.
Turakhia said he expects to use a traditional registry-registrar model for most of the domains, assuming Directi wins its contention sets.
“The strings that we have gone for are strings that are relevant to all registrars so we expect there to be significant adoption,” he said.
“If eNom were to apply for .web and .shop – and they probably will – and if they were to win those TLDs, then our registrar businesses would definitely carry them irrespective of the fact that we have our own TLDs,” he said. “There are only so many good viable strings out there.”
Most of Directi’s gTLDs, if approved, will be completely unrestricted.
For .movie, .law, .doctor and .bank there will be some tight restrictions, Turakhia said. (UPDATE: he later added that .insurance and .loans will also be restricted).
Some will also have additional rights protection mechanisms that go above and beyond what ICANN mandates in its standard registry contracts.
But none of its applications are “community” applications, the special category of application defined by ICANN.
Turakhia said he doesn’t think some of the applicants trying to “sneak through” as community applications will be successful.
“We’re treating these as all generic strings for anyone to register domains in,” he said. “.music for me does not represent a community. I could be a bathroom singer and want a .music domain name.”
“If you treat music lovers as a community then 100% of the world is part of that community.”

Marriott: we probably won’t use .hotel

Could .hotel be the next .travel?
That’s one view that emerged from a conference organized by the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse discussing ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program earlier this week.
“We think .hotel will launch,” Elizabeth Escobar, a senior IP lawyer with the hotel chain Marriott, said during one session at What’s At Stake on Tuesday. “We will probably blanket .hotel with a slew of defensive registrations most of which, like .travel, we will never use.”
Does she have a point?
The most prominent .hotel applicant, Luxembourg-based DotHotel, is backed by the International Hotel & Restaurant Association, suggesting that the concept does enjoy some support.
But restricted gTLD have performed poorly in the past. The .travel space, which launched in 2006, is generally regarded as having failed to live up to expectations.
It’s currently a 26,000-domain gTLD, and has only ever topped 50,000 domains under management due to a desperate, experimental foray into pay-per-click speculation.
It’s barely making enough money to fulfill its financial commitments to former owner TheGlobe.com, which acquired the original registry, Tralliance, during the later stages of its own death rattle, before .travel ever had a chance to execute.
But its lackluster performance is also no doubt also a result of its restrictive registration policies, which may well be mimicked by a .hotel gTLD approved next year, and its lack of channel adoption.
Could a .hotel succeed, where .travel has (so far) failed, if leading hotel chains see it purely as a defensive play?