Chehade to take charm offensive to ANA show

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has agreed to speak at an upcoming conference of the Association of National Advertisers, we’ve just been told.
Chehade, currently on a whirlwind global outreach tour, will deliver a lunch keynote on day two of the 2013 ANA Advertising Law & Public Policy Conference, held in Washington DC, March 19 and 20.
The speech is currently untitled, according to the agenda, but I’d hazard a guess that Chehade will be turning on his trademarked charm to attempt to bring more ANA members into the multistakeholder fold.
The ANA, of course, was ICANN’s primary antagonist in late 2011 and much of 2012, after it came out in strong opposition to the new gTLD program, lobbying the US Congress to have it delayed or killed off.
The relationship between the two organizations has mellowed, I sense, more recently, as the ANA has become more accustomed to working within the ICANN environment.
The ANA conference, which comes with the prescient subtitle “Change Ahead: Confrontation, Compromise or Chaos?” will also feature a panel discussion on new gTLDs featuring executives from Verizon and PayPal.

After eight months, similarity review creates only TWO new gTLD contention sets

ICANN has finally delivered its String Similarity Panel’s review of all 1,930 original new gTLD applications, finding that only four applied-for strings are confusingly similar to others.
Two new contention sets have been created:

• .hotels (Booking.com B.V.) and .hoteis (Despegar Online SRL)
• .unicorn (Unicorn a.s.) and .unicom (China United Network Communications Corporation Limited)

Only one applicant in each contention set will survive; the strings may go to auction.
The list is bafflingly short given that the panel’s review was originally due in October and has been delayed several times since.
ICANN last month said it was forcing the panel to address “process” issues and heavily suggested that it was trying to make sure the review process was legally defensible, leading to speculation that the list was going to be much longer than expected.
But the panel and ICANN appear to have taken a super-strict approach to finding similarity instead.
The string similarity panel was tasked with deciding whether each applied-for string “so nearly resembles another visually that it is likely to deceive or cause confusion”.
I think the four strings included in its final report pretty conclusively pass that test.
Even the controversial Sword tool – the software algorithm ICANN commissioned to compare string similarity on objective grounds — agrees, scoring them very highly.
According to Sword, .unicorn and .unicom are 94% similar and .hotels. v .hoteis have a score of 99%. For comparison, .hotel versus .hotels produces a score of 81%.
It all seems nice and logical and uncontroversial. But.
All four affected applicants are applying for single-registrant gTLDs, in which the registry owns all of the second-level domains, drastically reducing the chance of abuse.
One of the reasons ICANN doesn’t want to create too-similar TLDs is that they could be exploited by phishers and other bad guys to rip off internet users, or worse.
But with single-registrant TLDs, that’s not really as big of an issue.
It will be interesting to see the affected applicants’ response to these latest findings. Expect complaints.
The results of the review will be a huge relief to most other applicants, which have been wondering since the list of gTLD applications was released last June what the final contention sets would look like.
The high standard that appears to have been used to find similarity may set some interesting precedents.
For example, we now know that plurals are fair game: if Donuts’ application for .dentist is approved in this round, there’s nothing stopping somebody else applying for .dentists in a future application round.
Also, brands with very short acronyms have little to fear from from being found too similar to other existing acronym dot-brands. The applicants for .ged and .gea were among those to express concern about this.
But the question of confusing similarity is not yet completely settled. There’s a second phase.
Applicants and existing TLD registries now have about a week to prepare and submit formal String Confusion Objections, kicking off an arbitration process that could create more precedent for future rounds.
Unlike the just-published visual similarity review, SCOs can take issue with similar meanings and sounds too.
Losing an SCO means your application is dumped into a contention set with the winner; if you lose against an existing TLD operator, your bid is scrapped entirely.

NTIA fights Big Content’s corner, tells ALL new gTLD applicants to submit PICs

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration said today that all new gTLD applicants, even those that have not already been hit by government warnings, should submit Public Interest Commitments to ICANN.
In a rare comment sent to an ICANN public forum today, the NTIA suggested that applicants should use the process to help combat counterfeiting and piracy.
The agency, the part of the US Department of Commerce that oversees ICANN and participates in its Governmental Advisory Committee, said (emphasis in original):

NTIA encourages all applicants for new gTLDs to take advantage of this opportunity to address the concerns expressed by the GAC in its Toronto Communique, the individual early warnings issued by GAC members, and the ICANN public comment process on new gTLDs, as appropriate.

PICs were introduced by ICANN earlier this month as a way for applicants to voluntarily add binding commitments — for example, a promise to restrict their gTLD to a certain user base — to their registry contracts.
The idea is to let applicants craft and agree to stick to special terms they think will help them avoid receiving objections from the GAC, GAC members and others.
NTIA said that applicants should pay special attention in their PICs to helping out the “creative sector”.
Specifically, this would entail “ensuring that WHOIS data is verified, authentic and publicly accessible”.
They should also “consider providing an enforceable guaranty that the domain name will only be used for licensed and legitimate activities”, NTIA said, adding:

NTIA believes that these new tools may help in the fight against online counterfeiting and piracy and is particularly interested in seeing applicants commit to these or similar safeguards.

The PICs idea isn’t going down too well in the applicant community, judging by other submissions this week.
The Registries Stakeholder Group of ICANN, for example, says its members are feeling almost “blackmailed” into submitting PICs, saying the timing is “completely unreasonable”.
As DI noted when PICs was first announced, applicants have been given until just March 5 to submit their commitments, raising serious questions about the timetable for objections and GAC advice.
The RySG has even convened a conference call for March 4 to discuss the proposal, which it says “contains so many serious and fundamental flaws that it should be withdrawn in
its entirety”.

Trademark Clearinghouse to open March 26

The Trademark Clearinghouse is set to open its doors for submissions March 26, ICANN will announce today.
From that date, trademark owners and their agents will be able to start uploading trademark data, enabling them to participate in one or two of the new gTLD program’s rights protection mechanisms.
Adding a mark to the TMCH qualifies it for the Trademark Claims service, which notifies both rights-holders and registrants whenever somebody tries to register a domain matching the mark.
Trademark Claims will run for at least the first 60 days after each new gTLD launches, but ICANN may extend that window depending on the outcome of its “strawman” discussions.
Many trademarks will also qualify for Sunrise periods in new gTLDs by being entered into the Clearinghouse.
Submissions start at $150 per mark per year, with discounts available when marks are registered in bulk.
DI PRO subscribers can work out how painful the TMCH will be on their wallets, and how to maximize their discounts, using our Trademark Clearinghouse Cost Calculator.
The TMCH is being managed by Deloitte, with a back-end database run by IBM.
While March 26 is just four weeks before ICANN expects to approve the first new gTLDs, I wouldn’t expect to see the first Sunrise periods for a few months after that.
The TMCH is still subject to some fierce debate, and not only because of the proposed strawman changes.
On the technical side, registries and registrars have been fuming recently about the lack of any hard technical specifications for integration, which will be needed when the new gTLDs launch.
Last night, ICANN finally posted the first spec as an IETF Internet Draft.
The format, “Mark and Signed Mark Objects Mapping” describes an Extensible Provisioning Protocol extension used by the TMCH to exchange data with registries about registered trademarks.

AIG withdraws new gTLD bid due to rebrand

The insurance company American International Group has dropped its application for .chartis, apparently due to a merger-related rebranding.
It’s the 21st gTLD application to be withdrawn. Dot-Nxt did the legwork to figure out that the company has pulled out because the .chartis brand itself is being wound up.
When we asked ICANN last week how many bids were in the withdrawal queue, we were told the magic number was three.
Two of those are expected to be .chevy and .buick, which General Motors has confirmed it is withdrawing in addition to its already-gone .chevrolet, .cadillac and .gmc; .chartis is likely the third.
That doesn’t mean it is is the last, however.
Smart dot-brand applicants that are not completely sold on the new gTLD concept will be waiting for the publication of ICANN’s string similarity evaluation panel’s results, currently expected this Friday, before making their calls.
The string similarity results will go a long way to determine whether certain strings will have potentially lethal problems being applied for in future application rounds.
If .gmc had have been ruled confusingly similar to .gmo, for example, that may have reduced GM’s chances of successfully applying for .gmc in future rounds.

ICANN to set up “hubs” in Singapore and Istanbul

Fadi Chehade’s internationalization strategy for ICANN will see it open up two “hub” offices, one in Singapore and one in Istanbul, Turkey, according to reports.
The two new offices would be not just regional satellites, judging by reports from JPNIC and ZDNet. Chehade seems to be talking about both hubs taking on roughly equal prominence to its existing LA headquarters.
From ZDNet:

“This is not an office, this will be an actual hub and part of the core fabric of how we run ICANN,” he elaborated, adding the hubs would handle the same operations as that of its current Los Angeles, U.S., headquarters. “In Singapore we may be supporting Asia, but at different times of the day we may be supporting Europe.”

Both cities are often considered “gateways” to their respective regions.
Singapore has its attractive western-style business environment and widespread use of English, and Istanbul has a close cultural and geographic proximity to both Europe and the Middle-East.
ICANN has visited Singapore twice before — it held its inaugural meeting there in 1998 and approved the new gTLD program there in 2011 — and is to return in 2014.
Other satellite offices, for example in Tokyo and/or Beijing, could follow, Chehade reportedly said.
Channel Islands ccTLD manager Nigel Roberts is also reporting that ICANN staff currently based in LA may be offered the chance to relocate to one of the new hubs.
The new moves follow the recent closure of the Sydney, Australia office.

Nutty DCA complains to US Congress about .africa

DotConnectAfrica’s increasingly unhinged campaign for the .africa gTLD has seen it take the unusual step of complaining to the US Congress about “wholesale illegality” in the contest.
The company also appears to be running an astroturf campaign on Twitter and bogus blogs to advance its case.
In a rambling nine-page letter (pdf) to the chairs of the House and Senate telecommunications committees this week, DCA chief Sophia Bekele outlines a series of “corruption” claims against rival .africa applicant UniForum.
DCA and UniForum are both applying for .africa. UniForum, per ICANN rules, has the support of the African Union and over 60% of the national governments in Africa. DCA has no support.
As far as I can tell, DCA thinks the way the African Union went about picking a favored applicant for .africa was “corrupt” but the letter needs to be read several times in order to even begin to figure out what the allegations are.
The allegations seem to stretch back to 2011, when the AU publicly stated that it did not support DCA‘s claims to .africa, and that it had opened up an Expressions of Interest process to pick a preferred registry.
At the time, an organization called AfTLD, which represents African ccTLD operators, said it was preparing a bid for .africa. This bid later morphed into the UniForum bid.
According to information in Bekele’s letter, the AU wanted an experienced, Africa-based registry operator to run the TLD, and UniForum, which runs South Africa’s .za ccTLD, was the only qualified candidate.
DCA goes on to say that Vika Mpisane, who was both chair of AfTLD and CEO of .za policy overseer ZADNA, worked within AfTLD to have UniForum put forward as its preferred applicant for .africa.
The AU Commission, at the conclusion of its tender process, decided to support the UniForum proposal.
So what’s DCA’s beef?
Where exactly is the alleged corruption, according to DCA?
It’s almost impossible to tell from Bekele’s letter, which seems to deliberately confuse the process AfTLD used to back UniForum and the process the AU Commission used to select UniForum.
By DCA’s maddening logic, if Mpisane used his influence as chair of AfTLD to push for AfTLD to support UniForum’s bid, that means the AU Commission’s subsequent tender process was somehow corrupt.
It makes no sense to me, and I doubt it will make any sense to the dozens of US Congressmen DCA has carbon-copied on the letter.
My understanding is that DCA didn’t even bother to respond to the AU Commission’s tender anyway.
The second main prong of DCA’s new attack concerns the fact that UniForum’s bid for .africa is not a “Community” application, as defined under ICANN’s rules.
Again, DCA attempts to confuse the reader by conflating the normal everyday use of the word “community” with the special meaning of “Community” in the new gTLD program.
Bekele writes (emphasis removed):

UniForum contrived to obtain a highly valuable endorsement for a geographic name string under the pretext that it would be submitting an application on behalf of the African Community, but after obtaining the endorsement from the African Union Commission, not only failed to prepare and submit a Community TLD application for .Africa, but also failed, rather deliberately, to acknowledge the same African Community in its application that was submitted to ICANN for the .Africa gTLD name. DCA Trust believes that this was a very serious infraction on the part of UniForum ZA Central Registry.

Of course no applicant was obliged to submit a big-C Community application under ICANN’s rules, even if their gTLD purports to represent a small-c community.
Community applications are just a technicality of the ICANN program, designed to give advantages to applicants that truly do have the support of a community. There’s no need to take advantage of the mechanism if you’re applying for a geographic string and have the necessary government support.
Note also that DCA did not apply as a Community applicant either.
What does DCA want from Congress?
DCA is based in Mauritius. It appears to be complaining to the US Congress due to the US’ special oversight relationship with ICANN, and because its complaints to African governments have fallen on deaf ears.
It wants Congressional oversight of the new gTLD program, through the appointment of a special Ombudsman.
The letter says (again, emphasis removed):

We are hereby appealing directly to the United States Senate as the Upper House of the United States Congress, its Judiciary Committee, and other important Congressional committees that have a relevant stake in a successful outcome of the new gTLD process; to give the necessary approval and official impetus for the establishment of a new gTLD Program Ombudsman that would handle and look into different forms of grievances reported by new gTLD applicants; and investigate any forms of alleged irregularities and acts of illegality committed by applicants, especially of the sort that DCA Trust has outlined against its direct competitor for the .Africa gTLD, UniForum ZA Central Registry.

ICANN already has an Ombudsman, of course, Chris LaHatte. DCA complained to him late last year about two perceived conflicts of interest on the ICANN board of directors.
The complaint was dismissed last December because DCA was unable to provide LaHatte with any information about any improper actions.
LaHatte did however ask Bekele to simmer down the tone of her attacks, which she “readily agreed to”.
More fake identities?
Almost as an aside, I noticed today that a lot of similar-looking Twitter accounts (pictured) have been tweeting links with the hashtag #dotafrica this week.
The accounts all appear to have been created on Monday, using silhouette-based avatars, and have tweeted the same stuff at roughly the same time.
Is this more DCA astroturfing?
Bekele was caught out using a fake identity on the AfrICANN mailing list a few months ago.
Two of the “news blogs” these Twitter accounts have been linking to, domainingafrica.com and domainnewsafrica.com, were originally registered on November 21 2011, before disappearing behind Whois privacy last June.
The original registrant of both? Why, it’s Sophia Bekele.

Mali’s domain could change hands next week

ICANN’s board of directors will next week vote on whether to redelegate .ml, the country-code top-level domain for the war-torn nation of Mali, to a new registry operator.
The ccTLD is currently delegated to Societe des Telecommunications du Mali (Sotelma), a publicly traded telecommunications provider, but it’s not currently possible to register a .ml domain.
The reasons for a redelegation are never publicized by ICANN until after they are approved, when IANA publishes a redelegation report, so it’s not yet clear what’s going on this case.
Mali has been hitting headlines in Europe recently due to the French involvement in government efforts to retake the northern parts of the country from Islamist rebels.
Following the outbreak of hostilities a year ago, in March 2012 the Malian government was overthrown in a coup d’état that was widely condemned by the international community.
Following sanctions the military quickly ceded power to an interim president, who continues in the role today ahead of elections to find a more permanent successor, scheduled for July.
France, supported by allies including the UK, moved in to help Mali retake the north last month.
Sotelma is based in the capital, Bamako, which is not held by rebels.
The redelegation of .ml is on the main agenda — rather than the consent agenda, which is usually the case for redelegations — for ICANN’s board meeting next Thursday.

NAF picked to be first URS provider

The US-based National Arbitration Forum has been selected by ICANN as the first provider of Uniform Rapid Supsension services.
NAF, which is one half of the longstanding UDRP duopoly, submitted “an outstanding proposal demonstrating how it would meet all requirements presented in the [Request For Information]”, according to ICANN.
URS is meant to complement UDRP, enabling trademark owners to relatively quickly take down infringing domain names in clear-cut cases of cyberquatting.
Unlike UDRP, URS does not allow prevailing trademark owners to take control of the infringing domain, however. The names are merely suspended by the registry until they expire.
NAF already runs a suspension process, the Rapid Evaluation Service, for ICM Registry’s .xxx gTLD.
While exact pricing has not yet been disclosed, ICANN has previously stated that the successful RFI respondent had offered to process URS case for its target of between $300 and $500 per domain.
ICANN expects to approve more URS providers in future, saying that the system will be modeled on UDRP.
URS will only apply to new gTLDs for the time being, though there will inevitably be a push to have it mandated in legacy gTLDs such as .com in future, should it prove successful.

Iranian org not happy about .eco bids

The Iran-based treaty organization ECO, the Economic Cooperative Organization, has registered its displeasure with ICANN that several companies have applied for .eco as a gTLD.
ECO is a multinational IGO focused on development formed by Iran, Pakistan and Turkey in 1985. It has seven other Asian and Eurasian member states.
In a letter to ICANN brass this week, the organization said it “expresses its disapproval and non-endorsement to all the applications for .ECO gTLD and requests the ICANN and the new gTLD application evaluators to not approve these applications.”
.eco has been proposed as a gTLD for environmental causes by four companies. It was one of the first new gTLD ideas to emerge, several years ago, and was once backed by Al Gore.
Under changes to the application rules currently under development at ICANN, ECO may enjoy a second-level ban on the string “eco”, possibly only temporarily, under all new gTLDs.
The criteria for this IGO name protection is expected to be based on the criteria for registering a .int domain name, which are reserved for certain categories of international treaty organizations.
Unless ICANN really pulls the rug out from under applicants, the protection would not extend to the top-level in the current application round, however.
ECO notes in its letter that as it qualifies for a .int, it should be protected.
However, eco.int is not registered and ECO uses a .org domain for its web site, begging the question of how seriously it takes its domain name brand protection strategy.
Read ECO’s letter here.