Demand Media withdraws .bar application

Demand Media has withdrawn is application for the .bar new gTLD.
It’s the first of the company’s applications, filed via its United TLD subsidiary, to be withdrawn.
It was in a contention set with only one other applicant, a Mexican venture by the catchy name of Punto 2012 Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, which has also applied for .cafe and .rest.
There are now 97 withdrawn applications and a maximum of 1,357 future delegated gTLDs.

Amazon’s dot-brand likely doomed as US withdraws geo objection

The US government is set to allow the Governmental Advisory Committee to kill off Amazon’s application for .amazon, along with eight other new gTLDs with geographic flavors.
In a position paper published last night, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said:

the United States is willing in Durban to abstain and remain neutral on .shenzen (IDN in Chinese), .persiangulf, .guangzhou (IDN in Chinese), .amazon (and IDNs in Japanese and Chinese), .patagonia, .yun, and .thai, thereby allowing the GAC to present consensus objections on these strings to the Board, if no other government objects.

According to a GAC source, US protests were the “only reason” the GAC was unable to reach a consensus objection to these applications during the Beijing meeting three months ago.
Consensus would strengthen the objection, giving the ICANN board the presumption that the applications, some of which have already passed Initial Evaluation, should not be approved.
None of the nine applications in question met ICANN’s strict definition of a “geographic” string, but they nevertheless look geographic enough to raise concerns with GAC members.
Amazon’s application for .amazon raised the eyebrows of the Latin American countries that share the Amazonia region.
The company has been in talks with these GAC members since Beijing. If it wants to secure .amazon, it has a little over a week to address their concerns, if it wants to avoid an objection.
While the US is now promising to drop its objection to the GAC’s objection, it does not appear to have changed its position, claiming that governments have no rights to geographic strings. NTIA said:

The United States affirms our support for the free flow of information and freedom of expression and does not view sovereignty as a valid basis for objecting to the use of terms, and we have concerns about the effect of such claims on the integrity of the process.
…
the United States is not aware of an international consensus that recognizes inherent governmental rights in geographic terms.

It’s calling for a rethink of the process, during the mandatory review of the new gTLD program that ICANN must conduct before accepting a second round of applications.
Given that the GAC currently has the ability to object to any string for any reason, it’s difficult to see how a review could achieve the NTIA’s goal without reining in the GAC’s powers.

Today’s new gTLD updates: two withdrawals and two “Not Approved”

DotConnectAfrica and GCCIX WLL have become the first new gTLD applicants to have their applications — for .africa and .gcc respectively — officially flagged as “Not Approved” by ICANN.
Both were killed by Governmental Advisory Committee advice.
While GCC had passed its Initial Evaluation already, DCA’s IE results report (pdf), which were published last night, simply states: “Overall Initial Evaluation Summary: Incomplete”.
In both cases the decision to flunk the applications was taken a month ago by ICANN’s New gTLD Program Committee.
DCA filed a formal Reconsideration Request (pdf), challenging the decision in typically incomprehensible style, on June 19, threatening to take ICANN to an Independent Review Panel (ICANN’s very expensive court of appeals) if it does not overturn its decision.
Here’s a sample:

We have no intention of withdrawing our application against the backdrop that we rightly believe that the Board decision is injudicious, very wrong and injurious to our application and to our organizational aspirations. We are placing faith in the possibility that this particular communication will serve the purpose of causing the ICANN Board to have a rethink, and see the wisdom in allowing DCA Trust to continue to participate in the new gTLD Program without the necessity of going to an Independent Review Process (IRP) Panel to challenge the ICANN Board Decision which we presently disagree with in the most absolute terms.

The Board Governance Committee, which handles Reconsideration Requests, has a sturdy track record of denying them, so I think the chances of DCA’s being approved are roughly zero.
But if the company is nutty enough to try its hand at an IRP, which could quite easily set it back a few million dollars in legal fees, the story might not be over yet.
The GAC didn’t like DCA’s .africa bid because African governments back UniForum, DCA’s South Africa-based competitor for the string.
Had the application made it to Initial Evaluation — its processing number wasn’t up for a few weeks — it would have been flunked by the Geographic Names Panel due to its lack of support anyway.
GCC’s application for .gcc was also rejected by the GAC on geographic grounds. It stands for Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Persian/Arabian Gulf nations in question didn’t support the bid.
Also today, the American insurance company Allstate withdrew its applications for .carinsurance and .autoinsurance. Both were single-registrant “closed generics”, which ICANN has indicated might not be approved, also due to GAC advice.

ICANN says DotConnectAfrica’s .africa bid is officially “Not Approved”

Artemis signs 30 anchor tenants for .secure gTLD

Artemis, the NCC Group subsidiary applying for .secure, says it has signed up 30 big-name customers for its expensive, high-security new gTLD offering.
CTO Alex Stamos said that the list includes three “too big to fail” banks and three of the four largest social networking companies. They’ve all signed letters of intent to use .secure domains, he said.
He was speaking at a small gathering of customers and potential customers in London yesterday, to which DI was invited on the condition that we not report the name of anyone else in attendance.
Artemis is doing this outreach despite the facts that a) .secure is still in a two-way contention set and b) deep-pocketed online retailer Amazon is the other applicant.
Stamos told DI he’s confident that Artemis will win .secure one way or the other — hopefully Amazon’s single-registrant bid will run afoul of ICANN’s current rethink of “closed generics”.
He expects to launch .secure in the second or third quarter of next year with a few dozen registrants live from pretty much the start.
The London event yesterday, which was also attended by executives from a few household names, was the second of three the company has planned. New York was the first and there’ll soon be one in California.
I’m hearing so many stories about new gTLD applicants that still haven’t figured out their go-to-market strategies recently that it was refreshing to see one that seems to be on the ball.
Artemis’ vision for .secure is also probably the most technologically innovative proposed gTLD that I’m currently aware of.
As the name suggests, security is the order of the day. Registrants would be vetted during the lengthy registration process and the domain names themselves would be manually approved.
Not only will there not be any typosquatting, but there’s even talk of registering common typos on behalf of registrants.
Registrants would also be expected to adhere to levels of security on their web sites (mandatory HTTPS, for example) and email systems (mandatory TLS). Domains would be scanned daily for malware and would have manual penetration testing at least annually.
Emerging security standards would be deployed make sure that browsers would only trust SSL certificates provided by Artemis (or, more likely, its CA partner) when handling connections to .secure sites.
Many of the policies are still being worked out, sometimes in conversation with an emerging “community” of the aforementioned anchor tenants, but there’s one thing that’s pretty clear:
This is not a domain name play.
If you buy a .secure domain name, you’re really buying an NCC managed security service that allows you to use a domain name, as opposed to an easily-copied image, as your “trust mark”.
Success for .secure, if it goes live as planned, won’t be measured in registration volume. I wouldn’t expect it to be much bigger than .museum, the tiniest TLD today, within its first few years.
Prices for .secure have not yet been disclosed, but I’m expecting them to be measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. If “a domain” costs $50,000 a year, don’t be surprised.
Artemis’ .secure would however be available to any enterprise that can afford it and can pass its stringent security tests, which makes it more “open” than Amazon’s vaguely worded closed generic bid.
Other ICANN accredited registrars will technically be allowed to sell .secure domains, but the Registry-Registrar Agreement will be written in such a way as to make it economically non-viable for them to do so.
Overall, the company has a bold strategy with some significant challenges.
I wonder how enthusiastic enterprises will be about using .secure if their customers start to assume that their regular domain name (which may even be a dot-brand) is implicitly insecure.
Artemis is also planning to expose some information about how well its registrants are complying with their security obligations to end users, which may make some potential registrants nervous.
Even without this exposure, simply complying appears to be quite a resource-intensive ongoing process and not for the faint-hearted.
However, that’s in keeping with the fact that it’s a managed security service — companies buy these things in order to help secure their systems, not cover up problems.
Stamos also said that its eligibility guidelines are being crafted with its customers in such a way that registrants will only ever be kicked out of .secure if they’re genuinely bad actors.
Artemis’ .secure is a completely new concept for the gTLD industry, and I wouldn’t like to predict whether it will work or not, but the company seems to be going about its pre-sales marketing and outreach in entirely the correct way.

New gTLD registry contract approved, but applicants left hanging by GAC advice

ICANN has approved the standard registry contract for new gTLD registries after many months of controversy.
But its New gTLD Program Committee has also decided to put hundreds more applications on hold, pending talks with the Governmental Advisory Committee about its recent objections.
The new Registry Agreement is the baseline contract for all new gTLD applicants. While some negotiation on detail is possible, ICANN expects most applicants to sign it as is.
Its approval by the NGPC yesterday — just a couple of days later than recently predicted by ICANN officials — means the first contracts with applicants could very well be signed this month.
The big changes include the mandatory “Public Interest Commitments” for abuse scanning and Whois verification that we reported on last month, and the freeze on closed generics.
But a preliminary reading of today’s document suggests that the other changes made since the previous version, published for comment by ICANN in April, are relatively minor.
There have been no big concessions to single-registrant gTLD applicants, such as dot-brands, and ICANN admitted that it may have to revise the RA in future depending on how those discussions pan out.
In its resolution, the NGPC said:

ICANN is currently considering alternative provisions for inclusion in the Registry Agreement for .brand and closed registries, and is working with members of the community to identify appropriate alternative provisions. Following this effort, alternative provisions may be included in the Registry Agreement.

But many companies that have already passed through Initial Evaluation now have little to worry about in their path to signing a contract with ICANN and proceeding to delegation.
“New gTLDs are now on the home stretch,” NGPC member Chris Disspain said in a press release “This new Registry Agreement means we’ve cleared one of the last hurdles for those gTLD applicants who are approved and eagerly nearing that point where their names will go online.”
Hundreds more, however, are still in limbo.
The NGPC also decided yesterday to put a hold on all “Category 1” applications singled out for advice in the Governmental Advisory Committee’s Beijing communique.
That’s a big list, comprising hundreds of applications that GAC members had concerns about.
The NGPC resolved: “the NGPC directs staff to defer moving forward with the contracting process for applicants who have applied for TLD strings listed in the GAC’s Category 1 Safeguard Advice, pending a dialogue with the GAC.”
That dialogue is expected to kick off in Durban a little over a week from now, so the affected applicants may not find themselves on hold for too long.
Negotiations, however, are likely to be tricky. As the NGPC’s resolution notes, most people believe the Beijing communique was “untimely, ill-conceived, overbroad, and too vague to implement”.
Or, as I put it, stupid.
By the GAC’s own admission, its list of strings is “non-exhaustive”, so if the delay turns out to have a meaningful impact on affected applicants, expect all hell to break loose.

GNSO still breathing as ICANN retracts “flawed” Trademark+50 thinking

The Generic Names Supporting Organization isn’t dead after all.
ICANN’s Board Governance Committee has retracted a document related to new gTLD trademark protections that some on the GNSO Council believed spelled the end of the multistakeholder model as we know it.
The BGC, in rejecting a formal Reconsideration Request related to the “Trademark+50” mechanism, had used a rationale that some said was overly confrontational, legalistic and gave ICANN staff the ability to ignore community input more or less at will.
We reported on the issue in considerable detail here.
The committee on Friday retracted the original rationale, replacing it with one (pdf) that, while still containing some of the flawed reasoning DI noted last month, seems to have appeased the GNSO Council.
Neustar policy VP Jeff Neuman, who raised the original concerns, told the Council: “I believe the rationale is much more consistent with, and recognizes, the value of the multi-stakeholder model.”
The BGC did not change its ultimate decision — the Reconsideration Request has still been rejected and Trademark+50 is still being implemented in the new gTLD program.

Four new gTLD applications withdrawn, including one closed generic

Four new gTLD application were withdrawn overnight, including the first “closed generic” bid to be dropped since ICANN implemented a freeze on such applications.
Today’s withdrawals are:

• .movie — Of the eight applications for this string, this Dish DBS bid was one of only two proposed with single-registrant business models. It would have undoubtedly have been captured by the current ICANN hold on closed generics.
• .chesapeake — A dot-brand filed by Chesapeake Energy. It had already passed Initial Evaluation. While arguably a geographic string, it had not been classified as such by ICANN and had no objections or GAC advice.
• .chk — An abbreviation of the above, matching Chesapeake’s stock market ticker symbol. It had also already passed IE and had a clear run at delegation.
• .kerastase Yet another L’Oreal dot-brand application, the sixth of its original 14 bids to be withdrawn.

The total withdrawals to date now stands at 94, 49 of which were uncontested.

See all new gTLD withdrawls and Initial Evaluation results in a handy timeline

From today, DI PRO users have a new feature for tracking new gTLD withdrawals that removes the huge pain and inconvenience of actually having to read DI and other domain blogs.
It’s been the mostly commonly requested feature over the last couple of weeks, and we’re happy to oblige.
The New gTLD Program Timeline lists all withdrawals, evaluation results and other major changes to application status, in chronological order.
There are over 1,100 entries in the database so far, going back to August 2012. Withdrawals are automatically updated daily, IE results weekly on Friday evenings UTC.
It’s designed for utility. Here’s a screen grab:

To join the growing ranks of DI PRO subscribers click here. Subscribers also get access to the following tools and searchable databases:
Daily new gTLD program stats, searchable Initial Evaluation scores, the most comprehensive and flexible database of gTLD applications available anywhere, and much more.

90 passes and 2 failures in this week’s gTLD results

ICANN has just delivered this week’s batch of Initial Evaluation results, with 90 passes and two failures to report.
The two applications that failed to achieve passing scores are Commercial Connect’s .shop and .supersport, a dot-brand filed by a South African television company. Both are eligible for extended evaluation.
Commercial Connect is the first applicant to fail to achieve a passing score on its technical evaluation.
I believe the company, which was among the unsuccessful applicants in the 2000 round of new gTLDs, is one of the few applicants this time around proposing to self-host its registry back-end.
It did, however, pass the financial component of the evaluation.
SuperSport failed, like nine others before it, on its financial evaluation, having scored a 0 on its “Financial Statements” question.
These are the passing applications this week:

.shop .viking .nagoya .osaka .shop .cruise .baidu .motorcycles .bananarepublic .allfinanzberatung .shiksha .top .bio .republican .aol .mail .navy .fyi .jcb .photos .wine .app .diy .law .data .foo .film .corp .ibm .physio .htc .pohl .chanel .gdn .ubs .secure .woodside .ultrabook .gold .show .soccer .map .web .coffee .apple .compare .markets .schule .fitness .courses .hotel .discover .spreadbetting .ngo .cbs .immo .home .drive .williamhill .racing .movie .store .barefoot .kaufen .memorial .abb .bbva .cpa .unicom .voto .skype .vet .doctor .tennis .space .nab .web .bet .scor .food .fail .konami .day .games .garden .book .hosting .ollo .montblanc .click

There are now 909 passing applications and 11 eligible for extended evaluation.