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Seven ICANN directors have new gTLD conflicts

Kevin Murphy, February 17, 2012, Domain Policy

Seven members of ICANN’s board of directors have self-identified conflicts of interest when it comes to the new generic top-level domains program, according to a report from its last meeting.
Chair Steve Crocker, CEO of the consulting firm Shinkuro, appears to be newly conflicted.
He was among the directors to excuse themselves before the board discussed a resolution on new gTLDs last week, but he did vote on a new gTLD resolution at its December meeting.
Crocker has previously revealed that new gTLD applicant and registry services provider Afilias has an investment in Shinkuro.
Vice-chair Bruce Tonkin is chief strategy officer at Melbourne IT, which is a registrar as well as a new gTLD consultancy, and he also excused himself.
Ram Mohan and Suzanne Woolf, both non-voting directors, excused themselves because they work for registry service providers (Afilias and Internet Systems Consortium respectively).
Non-voting liaison Thomas Narten also declared a conflict, which is a heavy hint that his employer, IBM, is poised to apply for a dot-brand gTLD.
The other conflicted directors were Sébastien Bachollet, CEO of BBS International Consulting, and Bertrand de La Chapelle of the International Diplomatic Academy.
Two directors appear to be newly unconflicted.
Kuo-Wei Wu and Thomas Roessler declared new gTLD program conflicts at the board’s December meeting but did not excuse themselves last week.
Erika Mann of Facebook missed the meeting (she also missed the December meeting) so it’s not clear whether there’s a “.facebook” conflict of interest yet.
The board of directors has 16 voting members. Nine need to be present for its meetings to be quorate.
ICANN introduced new conflict rules after former chair Peter Dengate Thrush took a job with new gTLD applicant/consultant Minds + Machines shortly after voting to approve the program last June.

New gTLD applications briefly vanish after glitch

Kevin Murphy, February 2, 2012, Domain Tech

A software glitch in ICANN’s TLD Application System was apparently to blame for a number of “disappearing” new generic top-level domain applications today.
At about 4pm UTC today, two Neustar executives tweeted that some applications, among them the company’s own .neustar dot-brand application, had vanished from their TAS accounts.
TAS is the web-based application, presented as a series of questions, which applicants must use to file and pay for their new gTLD applications.
Several other applicants were also believed to be affected.
It took about two hours for ICANN to sort the problem out.
A spokesperson later said: “A display issue occurred in TAS, it has been corrected. All data is now visible & no information was lost.”
It’s the second technical problem to be reported in TAS this week.
On Tuesday, consultant Fairwinds Partners reported that some applicants had problems filling out their TAS profiles, preventing them from completing their applications.
Frankly, I’d be more surprised if this kind of thing didn’t happen.
TAS is brand new custom-built software, and as anyone who’s ever written software will tell you, no amount of testing can substitute for production use when it comes to finding bugs.

New gTLD batching: should .brands go first?

Kevin Murphy, November 9, 2011, Domain Policy

Should “.brand” and “.city” top-level domain applicants get priority treatment when ICANN picks which new gTLDs get to go live first?
That’s the worry in the domain name industry this week, in the wake of rumors about ICANN’s latest thinking on “batching” applications into a processing queue.
ICANN has said it will not process more than 500 applications at a time, but this may well be a low-ball estimate of how many it will actually receive in the first round.
Depending on how many companies decide to pull the trigger on .brand or .keyword applications, we could be looking at three times that number.
Random selection is probably a non-starter due to the risk of falling foul of US gambling laws, and ICANN has already ruled out an auction.
It’s likely that there will be a way to “opt out” of the first batch for applicants not particularly concerned about time-to-market, senior staff said at ICANN’s meeting in Dakar last month.
But the rumor doing the rounds this week is that the organization is thinking about prioritizing uncontested applications – gTLDs with a single applicant – into earlier batches.
This would mean that .brand and .city gTLDs would probably find themselves in the first batches, while contested generics such as .web and .music would be processed later.
It’s just a rumor at this point, but it’s one I’ve heard from a few sources. It also got an airing during Neustar’s #gtldchat Twitter conflab this evening.
Any gTLD purporting to represent a geographic location will need an endorsement from the relevant local government, which will lead to most geo-gTLD being uncontested.
Most, but perhaps not all, .brands are also likely to be uncontested, due to the relative uniqueness of the brand names with the resources to apply.
On the other hand, potentially lucrative strings such as .web, .blog, and .music will almost certainly have multiple applicants and will require lengthier processing cycles.
With a de facto prioritization of .brands and .cities, ICANN could put a bunch of gTLDs into the root, proving the new gTLD concept and giving it time to bulk up on experienced staff, before the whole thing sinks into a quagmire of objections, trademark gaming and spurious litigation.
I can see how that might be attractive option.
I’m not sure if it would solve the problem, however. If we’re looking at 1,500 applications, that’s three batches, so it would not be as simple as dividing them into contested and uncontested piles.
Of course, nobody knows how many applications will be submitted, and what the mix will be. It’s a very difficult problem to tackle in the dark.
What do you think? Should the contested status of a gTLD be used as a criterion for batching purposes?