Live new gTLDs this month? First four pass to delegation

New gTLDs are on the home stretch, after ICANN sent the first four applications to the final delegation stage of the process.
The four are: .сайт (Russian “.site”) and .онлайн (Russian “.online”) from Core Association, شبكة. (Arabic “.web”) from dotShabaka Registry and .游戏 (Chinese “.games”) from Donuts.
These were also the first four to sign their registry contracts with ICANN — over three months ago — and the first to be given their name collisions mitigation plan, just a few days ago.
Proceeding to delegation means the applications are now in the hands of IANA, the ICANN department with responsibility over changes to the DNS root system.
IANA has its own set of procedures to follow before delegating, which have historically taken a couple of weeks to process. If I recall correctly, .xxx was with IANA for about 10 days before it went live.
It seems possible that the first new gTLDs could be live this month, meaning the first sunrise periods could kick off in early December, with general availability following a month later.
However, the Christmas and New Year holiday period may wind up forcing some registrars to stagger their dates in order to benefit from the best publicity window when they finally go on sale.

First collision block-lists out now. How painful will they be for new gTLDs?

ICANN has published the name collision block-lists for the first four new gTLDs, and they making pretty interesting reading.
The four registries in question will be required to block between 104 and 680 unique second-level domains from their gTLDs if they want to use the fastest path to delegation on offer.
The four gTLDs with lists published this morning are: .сайт (Russian “.site”), .онлайн (Russian “.online”), شبكة. (Arabic “.web”) and .游戏 (Chinese “.games”).
These were the first four new gTLDs with signed Registry Agreements. ICANN seems to be following the order contracts were signed, rather than the official prioritization number.
So what’s on the lists?
Gibberish
The first thing to note is that, as expected, ICANN has helpfully removed invalid strings (such as those with underscores) and gibberish Google Chrome strings from the lists, greatly reducing their size.
The block-lists are based on Day In The Life Of The Internet data, which recorded DNS root queries for applied-for gTLDs over 48-hour periods between 2006 and 2013.
According to ICANN, “a significant proportion” of the DITL queries were for the nonsense 10-character strings that Chrome generates and sometimes accidentally sends to the public DNS.
Because these “appear to present minimal risk if filtered from the block lists”, ICANN has made an effort to automatically remove as many as possible, while acknowledging it may not have caught them all. The human eye is good at spotting meaningless strings, software is not so adept.
All four lists still contain plenty of gibberish strings, according to this human eye, but mostly they’re not of 10 characters in length.
IDNs
All four lists published today are for non-Latin domain names and are presumably expecting their registries to be mostly populated with IDN.IDN domain names.
As such, the impact of their mostly Latin block-lists may be even smaller than it first appears.
For example, if we look at the list for .сайт, which has 680 strings to block, we discover that only 80 of them are IDNs (beginning with xn--). I assume they’re all, like the gTLD, in Cyrillic script.
I haven’t decoded all of these strings from Punycode and translated them from Russian, but the fact is there’s only 80 of them, which may not be unduly punitive on CORE Association’s launch plan.
At the other end of the spectrum, Donuts will only have to block 13 IDN strings from its .游戏 (Chinese .games) gTLD, and the ASCII strings on its list are mostly numeric or gibberish.
There’s very probably some potentially valuable generic strings on these lists, of course, which could impact the landrush purse, but it’s beyond this monoglot’s expertise to pick them out.
Trademarks
A small number of Latin-script brands appear on all four lists.
Donuts will have to block nokia.游戏, htc.游戏 and ipad.游戏 in its Chinese “.games”, for example. CORE will have to block iphone.сайт and brazzersnetwork.онлайн. DotShabaka Registry will have to block شبكة.redbull.
The impact of this on the registries could be minimal — a few fewer sunrise sales, assuming the brand owner intended to defensively register.
If the blocked brand was a potential launch partner it could be much more annoying and even a launch-delaying factor. It’s not yet clear how registries and brand owners will be able to get these names unblocked.
Bear in mind that registries are not allowed to activate these domains in any sense for any use — they must continue to return NXDOMAIN error responses as they do today.
I’m sure ipad.游戏 (“ipad.games”) could have some value to Apple — and to Donuts, in the unlikely event it managed to persuade Apple to be an anchor tenant — but it’s no longer available.
ICANN will deliver full mitigation plans for each gTLD, which may often include releasing blocked names to their ‘rightful’ owner, but that’s not expected for some months.
Generic terms
A number of generic dictionary terms are getting blocked, which may prove irksome for those registries with long lists. For example, CORE will have to block photo.сайт and forum.сайт.
So far, .онлайн has by far the longest list of ASCII generics to block — stuff like “football”, “drinks”, “poker” and “sex”. Even weirdness like “herpesdating” and “musclefood”.
As it’s an IDN, this might not be too painful, but once ICANN starts publishing lists for Latin gTLDs we might start seeing some serious impact on registries’ ability to sell and market premium domains.
Shurely shome mishtake
There are a few strings on these lists that are just weird, or are likely to prove annoying to registries.
All four of these gTLDs are going to have to block “www” at the second level, for example, which could impact their registry marketing — www.tld is regularly used by TLD registries.
It is going to be really problematic if “www” shows up on the block-lists for dot-brand registries — many applicants say “www.” is likely to be the default landing page for their dot-brand.
The only string that ICANN says it won’t put on any block-list is “nic”, which was once the standard second-level for every TLD’s registry web site but doesn’t really have mass recognition nowadays.
The block-lists also include two-letter strings, most of which correspond to ccTLDs and all of which are already banned by the base Registry Agreement for precisely that reason.
There’s no reason for these two-letter names to be on the lists, but I don’t see their presence causing any major additional heartaches for registries.
So is this good news or what?
As the four block-lists to be released so far are for IDN gTLDs, and because I don’t speak Chinese, Arabic or Russian, it’s a difficult call today to say how painful this is going to be.
There are plenty of reasons to be worried if you’re a new gTLD applicant, certainly.
Premium names will be taken out of play.
You may lose possible anchor tenants.
Your planned registry-use domain names may be banned.
If you’re a dot-brand, you’d better start thinking of alternatives to “www.”.
But the block-lists are expected to be temporary, pending permanent mitigation, and they’re so far quite small in terms of meaningful strings, so on balance I’d say so far it’s not looking too bad.
On the other hand, nothing on the published lists jumps out at me like a massive security risk, so the whole exercise might be completely pointless and futile anyway.

Donuts and Uniregistry sign more new gTLD contracts

ICANN has signed eight more Registry Agreements with new gTLD applicants, six of them with Donuts.
Donuts’ newly contracted gTLDs are .photos, .recipes, .limo, .domains, .coffee and .viajes (.travel in Spanish).
Uniregistry, meanwhile, signed an RA for .gift and Luxury Partners signed for .luxury.
As you might expect from these portfolio applicants, they’re all expected to be open, unrestricted registries.

Ralph Lauren can’t have .polo, panel rules

Ralph Lauren’s application for the dot-brand .polo is likely at an end, after the International Chamber of Commerce ruled that it would infringe the rights of polo players.
The Community Objection to the gTLD was filed by the US Polo Association, the governing body of the sport in the US, and supported by the Federation of International Polo, along with seven national and 10 regional US-based polo associations.
The FIP letter was crucial in ICC panelist Burkhard Hess’ decision to find against Ralph Lauren, persuading him that there was “substantial opposition” from a “clearly delineated” polo-playing community.
The word “polo” was often used in straw man arguments when the new gTLD program and its objection mechanisms were being designed. Who gets .polo? Ralph Lauren? Volkswagen? Nestle? The sport?
Well, now we know: according to the ICC, the sport will probably trump any dot-brand.
The precedent might be bad news for Donuts and Famous Four Media, which are facing Community Objections from the international governing bodies of rugby and basketball on .rugby and .basketball.
However, none of those applications are for dot-brand spaces.
Under the Community Objection rules, the objector has to show that the gTLD would harm its interests is delegated.
In the case of .polo, the panelist found detriment largely due to the fact that Ralph Lauren’s plan was for a single-registrant space from which the sports associations would be excluded.
With open, unrestricted .basketball and .rugby applications, it’s likely to be much harder for the objectors to prove that the gTLDs would damage the sport.

.shopping ruled confusingly similar to .shop

An International Centre for Dispute Resolution panelist has ruled that .shop and .shopping are too confusingly similar to coexist on the internet.
The panelist was Robert Nau, the same guy who ruled that .通販 and .shop are confusingly similar.
Again, the objector is .shop applicant Commercial Connect, which filed String Confusion Objections against almost every new gTLD application related to buying stuff online.
The defendant in this case was Donuts, via subsidiary Sea Tigers LLC.
Here’s the key part of the decision:

the concurrent use of “shopping”, the participle, and the root word “shop”, in gTLD strings will result in probable confusion by the average, reasonable Internet user, because the two strings have sufficient similarity in sound, meaning, look and feel. The average Internet user would not be able to differentiate between the two strings, and in the absence of some other external information (such as an index or guidebook) would have to guess which of the two strings contains the information the user is looking to view.
The adopters of the applicable standard of review for string confusion hypothetically could have allowed an unlimited number of top level domain names using the same root, and simply differentiate them by numbers, e.g., <.shop1>, <.shop2>, <.shop3>, etc., or other modifiers, including pluralization, or other similar variations of a root word, or other modifiers before or after the root word. While that might allow for increased competition, as argued by Applicant, it would only lead to a greater level of confusion and uncertainty among average, reasonable Internet users. Accordingly, the Applicant’s argument that the concurrent use of a root word and its participle version in a string increases competition is not persuasive in this context, and is rejected.

So far, Commercial Connect has lost 15 of the 21 SCOs it filed, against strings as weird as .supply and .shopyourway. Four cases remain open.
There are nine applicants for .shop, including Commercial Connect. Uniregistry has also applied for .shopping, but did not receive an objection.

Name collision block-lists to be published this week

ICANN will begin to publish the lists of domains that new gTLD registries must block at launch as early as this week, according to an updated name collisions plan released last night.
Registries that have already signed contracts with ICANN will be given their block-lists “before the end of this week”, ICANN said.
Registries that were not able to sign contracts because they’d been given an “uncalculated risk” categorization will now be invited, in priority order, to contracting.
The base Registry Agreement itself has been updated — unilaterally — to include provisions requiring registries to block second-level names deemed risky when they are delegated.
For each contracted gTLD, ICANN will provide what it’s calling a SLD Collision Occurrence Assessment, which will outline the steps registries need to take to mitigate their own collision risk.
It is also expected to contain a list of SLDs that have been seen on the Day In The Life Of The Internet data sets, collected from root server operators over 48-hour periods between 2006 and 2013.
Using previous years’ DITL data is news to me, and could potentially greatly expand the number of SLDs — already expected to be in the thousands in many cases — that registries are obliged to block.
“Most” new gTLD applicants are expected to be eligible for what ICANN calls an “alternative path to delegation”, in which the registry simply blocks the SLDs on an ICANN-provided list, gets delegated, and deals with the SLD Collision Occurrence Assessment at a later date.
Here’s how ICANN described the timetable for this:

For Registry Operators with executed registry agreements the Assessments and SLD lists will be posted to the specific TLD’s registry agreement page on the ICANN website. The first of these will be available before the end of this week.
In the coming weeks ICANN will post the alternative path eligibility assessments and SLD lists for all applied-for gTLDs.

In other words, if you haven’t already signed a contract there’s not yet a firm date on when you’ll find out how many — and which — names you’re expected to block, or even if you’re eligible for the alternative delegation path.

Trademark+50 costs $75 to $200 a pop

The Trademark Clearinghouse has started accepting submissions under the new “Trademark+50” service, with prices starting at about $76.
It’s now called the Abused DNL (for Domain Name Label) service.
It allows trademark owners to add up to 50 additional strings — which must have been cybersquatted according to a court or a UDRP panel — to each record they have in the TMCH.
To validate labels found in court decisions, it will cost mark owners $200 and then $1 per abused string. For UDRP cases, the validation fee is $75.
If you’re on the “advanced” (read: bulk) fee structure, the prices drop to $150 and $50 respectively.
To add a UDRP case covering 25 domains to the Abused DNL would cost $100 in the first year and $25 a year thereafter, for example.
Adding a trademark to the TMCH costs between $95 and $150 a year, depending on your fee structure.

Second dot-brand gets ICANN contract

CITIC Group has signed a new gTLD Registry Agreement with ICANN, the second dot-brand to do so.
The Chinese financial services giant signed on the dotted line for .中信, the Chinese-script version of its company name.
The company has also applied for .citic, but that application is a little further down ICANN’s processing queue.
A little over two weeks ago, Samsung became the first dot-brand to enter into an ICANN registry contract.
CITIC becomes the 58th new gTLD with a contract, though 613 have been invited to contracting.
UPDATE: Oops! Thanks to the reader who alerted me to the fact that .中信 is actually the third dot-brand with a contract. The gTLD .otsuka (which is a Japanese pharmaceuticals company and not, as I thought, a geographic region) was in fact the second. I regret the error.

What does Neelie Kroes know about multistakeholderism?

European Commission vice president Neelie Kroes wants “your ideas on how the Internet should be governed and what Europe’s role should be.”
In a survey launched last week, Kroes, who has special responsibility for the “digital agenda” in Europe, criticized ICANN’s “multi-stakeholder” process.
She solicited suggestions on how governments should be treated within ICANN, and asked “How can a move from unilateral to multilateral accountability be realised?”
Kroes said on her blog (link in original):

we also must have a clearer view of what we mean when we speak of “multi-stakeholder processes”. I worry that without a clear definition, everyone will claim that their decision processes are inclusive and transparent, when in practice they are not – as was shown recently, when the Governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN pressed on regardless – in spite of the EU’s legitimate concerns on new domain names.

Let’s parse this.
On the one hand, Kroes is stating that ICANN’s process is not “inclusive and transparent”.
On the other, she’s linking to her own demands for special privileges for the European Commission in the debate over whether wine producers need special protections in the new gTLDs .wine and .vin.
I reported on Kroes letter a month ago.
As the letter and the public record makes plain, the GAC had originally asked ICANN for more time in order to consider whether the .wine protections were warranted.
In the end, the GAC was unable to reach a consensus on the matter and advised ICANN accordingly.
With no GAC consensus, ICANN has no mandate to act.
But Kroes wants ICANN to delay the .wine and .vin applications anyway, based on little more than the European Commission’s unilateral demands.
Is her definition of a “multi-stakeholder” process one in which individual governments get to override the consensus of dozens of governments? It certainly looks that way.
And it wouldn’t be the first time Kroes has tried to usurp the multi-stakeholder process in order to get what she wants.
Back in June 2011, she called for ICANN to be reformed because she didn’t like the fact that ICANN did not accept all the GAC’s advice when it approved the new gTLD program.
A month earlier, she privately wrote to the US Department of Commerce — which controls the DNS root server — to ask that it refuse to delegate the recently approved .xxx gTLD.
That would have been an unprecedented and worrying move by Commerce, and naturally it declined.
But the fact that Kroes even asked makes me wonder how serious she is about “multistakeholderism”.
It’s a newish term, poorly defined, but reason dictates that it means you can’t always get what you want.
Kroes blog post is available here. More information about her call for comments can be found here.

Reconsideration is not an appeals process: ICANN delivers another blow to Amazon’s gTLD hopes

Amazon has lost its appeal of a ruling that says its applied-for new gTLD .通販 is “confusingly similar” to .shop, with ICANN ruling that its Reconsideration mechanism is not an appeals process.
The e-commerce giant lost a String Confusion Objection filed by .shop applicant Commercial Connect in August, with panelist Robert Nau ruling that the two strings were too confusing to co-exist.
That’s despite one of the strings being written in Latin script and the other Japanese. The ruling was based on the similarity of meaning: 通販 means “online shopping”.
Amazon immediately filed a Reconsideration Request with ICANN.
Days earlier, Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Generic Domains Division, had described this process as one of the “avenues for asking for reconsidering the decision”.
Atallah was less clear on whether Reconsideration was applicable to decisions made by third-party panels — the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook contains conflicting guidance.
ICANN’s Board Governance Committee, which handles Reconsideration Requests, has now answered that question: you can ask for Reconsideration of a new gTLD objection ruling, but you’ll only win if you can prove that there was a process violation by the panel.
In its decision, the BGC stated:

Although Commercial Connect’s Objection was determined by a third-party DRSP, ICANN has determined that the Reconsideration process can properly be invoked for challenges of the third-party DRSP’s decisions where it can be stated that either the DRSP failed to follow the established policies or processes in reaching the decision, or that ICANN staff failed to follow its policies or processes in accepting that decision.

That’s moderately good news as a precedent for applicants wronged by objections, in theory. In practice, it’s likely to be of little use, and it was of no use to Amazon. The BGC said:

In the context of the New gTLD Program, the Reconsideration process does not call for the BGC to perform a substantive review of DRSP Panel decisions; Reconsideration is for the consideration of process- or policy-related complaints.
…
As there is no indication that either the ICDR or the Panel violated any policy or process in accepting and sustaining Commercial Connect’s Objection, this Request should not proceed. If Amazon thinks that it has somehow been treated unfairly in the process, and the Board (through the NGPC) adopts this Recommendation, Amazon is free to ask the Ombudsman to review this matter.

While the BGC declined to revisit the substance of the SCO, it did decide that it’s just fine for a panelist to focus purely on the meaning of the allegedly confusing strings, even if they’re wholly visually dissimilar.

The Panel’s focus on the meanings of the strings is consistent with the standard for evaluating string confusion objections. A likelihood of confusion can be established with any type of similarity, including similarity of meaning.

In other words, Nau’s over-cautious decision stands: .通販 and .shop will have to enter the same contention set.
That’s not great news for Amazon, which will probably have to pay Commercial Connect to go away at auction, but it’s also bad news for increasingly unhinged Commercial Connect, whose already slim chances of winning .shop are now even thinner.
Commercial Connect had also filed a Reconsideration Request around the same time as Amazon’s, using the .通販 precedent to challenge a much more sensible SCO decision, which ruled that .shop is not confusingly similar to .购物, Top Level Domain Holdings’ application for “.shopping” in Chinese.
The BGC ruled that the company had failed to adequately state a case for Reconsideration, meaning that this objection ruling also stands.
The big takeaway appears to be that the BGC reckons it’s okay for objection panels to deliver decisions that directly conflict with one another.
This raises, again, questions that have yet to be answered, such as: how do you form contention sets when one string has been ruled confusingly similar and also not confusingly similar to another?