Now NetNames complains about digital archery

Another big domain name registrar has come out in opposition to ICANN’s “digital archery” system for batching new top-level domain applications.
NetNames, part of Group NBT, has asked ICANN to delay digital archery – currently scheduled to kick off this Friday – until a better batching solution can be found.
In a letter to ICANN, general manager Stephane Van Gelder wrote:

As it stands, DA risks generating applicant confusion. It is a contentious system that seems to favour those with in-depth knowledge of the second-hand domain industry and more specifically, its drop-catching techniques.

There’s no denying that, of course. Pool.com and Digital Archery Experts are both offering archery services to new gTLD applicants based on this kind of insight.
NetNames is also concerned that the archery system was created without any formal community input, and therefore suggests it be delayed until after the Prague meeting later this month.

ICANN saw fit to take its TLD Application System (TAS) offline at the last minute and keep it that way for over a month as it sought to identify and correct a computer problem. We urge that the same flexibility be exercised with regards to batching, so that the currently proposed system, which is clearly flawed and unfair, be re-examined and adapted.

NetNames follows Melbourne IT, which expressed similar concerns to ICANN last week.
Van Gelder is of course also chair of the GNSO Council, though he wasn’t wearing that hat whilst writing this particular letter (pdf).

Donuts applies for 307 (yes, 307) gTLDs

Donuts Inc has finally showed its hand.
The company, which was set up as a portfolio gTLD player by domain industry veterans Paul Stahura, Richard Tindal, Jonathon Nevett and Daniel Schindler, is applying for 307 gTLDs.
Yes, 307. That’s roughly 15% of all the applications ICANN has received.
We were all expecting big plans from Donuts, but I’m not sure many people thought it would go for so many strings.
The company has raised $100 million from Austin Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, TL Ventures, Generation Partners and Stahurricane to fund the ambitious plans.
Demand Media has been chosen to provide the back-end registry.
Donuts has also staffed up with some familiar faces. Former ICANN CFO Kevin Wilson is its new CFO, former Oversee marketing chief Mason Cole has joined as vice president of communications and industry relations.
The company says it has created almost two dozen new rights protection mechanisms for its gTLDs, but that it has an “open internet” philosophy.
“We have resources set aside for handling objections by parties who, for whatever reason, believe only they are equipped to administer a generic term,” Stahura said in a press release.
“The Internet is an engine of information, ideas and commerce, and one that’s not restrictive unnecessarily. Donuts intends to preserve that openness for all users, not operate a ‘by invitation only’ section of the Internet.”
I’m guessing this means there’s going to be fireworks in contention sets such as, say, .music.
The full list of applied-for strings doesn’t seem to be available yet.

GAC gets its way in new Applicant Guidebook

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is the beneficiary of the biggest changes in the new version of the new gTLD program Applicant Guidebook.
Published late last night, the Guidebook has been revised with mainly cosmetic changes.
The exception is the updated text on GAC Advice on New gTLDs, the mechanism through which the GAC can effectively torpedo any new gTLD application it doesn’t like.
The new text is exactly what the GAC asked for following the ICANN meeting in Dakar last October, rather than the edited version ICANN chose to put in the Guidebook in January.
Basically, the GAC put ICANN staff on the naughty step in Costa Rica this March for failing to insert its advice into the Guidebook verbatim, and this has now been rectified.
The changes don’t mean a heck of a lot for applicants.
Essentially, if the GAC finds a consensus against an application, there’s still a “strong presumption” that the ICANN board should reject it.
If only some governments object, the board is still expected to enter into talks to understand the scope of the concern before making its call.
The new Guidebook has removed two references to the fact that the ICANN board can overrule a GAC advice-objection, but that power still exists in ICANN’s bylaws.
The main reason the text has been removed was that the GAC complained in Costa Rica that it appeared to weaken the consultation process required by the bylaws.
And it was pissed off that ICANN staff had edited its text without consultation.

Dot Registry applying for four US-only gTLDs

Dot Registry LLC, a new company to the domain name industry, has applied to ICANN for four company-themed gTLDs, saying it has the backing of US secretaries of state.
It’s going for .inc, .corp, .llc and .llp.
CEO Shaul Jolles says the plan is for all four to be restricted to US-registered companies, even though some other countries give their companies the same labels.
“While the extensions do exist in other countries, they do not have definitions similar to the entity classifications in the US,” Jolles said in an email.
“We will not offer registrations to companies not registered in the US,” he said. “We chose this option because we are able to easily verify business entity registration in the US.”
Dot Registry, which is using .us contractor Neustar as its registry services provider, says it has support from various US secretaries of state.
As we blogged in April, the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State wrote to ICANN to express reservations about these types of gTLD strings.
But Delaware Secretary of State Jeffrey Bullock indicated in a separate letter that Dot Registry’s propose regime of restrictions, which would manually match domains to company names, might be acceptable.
I’m still somewhat skeptical about the value of these kind of gTLDs. You can pretty much guarantee plenty of pointless defensive registrations, and the benefits seem fuzzy.
“The benefit of these strings is two-fold,” Jolles said. “For consumers it creates a level of reassurance and the ability to quickly ascertain if a company is legitimate or not.”
“From a company perspective it has simple benefits such as guaranteeing that you receive a domain name that matches your registered business name, increased consumer confidence which increases revenue, and a decreased possibility of business identity theft in a cyber setting,” he said.

Afnic working with 16 gTLD applicants in France

Sixteen French new top-level domain applicants have selected .fr manager Afnic to provide the back-end registry for their applications, according to the company.
The applicants are from “local public authorities, companies and associations”, Afnic said in a press release. An application for .paris is thought to be among them.
The announcement puts Afnic in the customer-win lead in terms of European ccTLD operators branching out into the gTLD back-end market.
Austria’s Nic.at is involved with 11 applications, while .uk’s Nominet is involved with seven.

Hilton Prague screws over ICANN delegates

Lots of people attending ICANN’s public meeting in Prague later this month are complaining that the venue, the Hilton Prague Hotel, has rebooked them into hotels miles away.
It’s not clear how widespread the problem is, but I’d guess dozens of people are affected, judging by the chatter.
Amusingly, given recent events, it appears that a technical glitch with the hotel’s booking system is to blame.
One attendee, who was bumped to a hotel an hour’s walk away from the venue, was told the rebooking was “due to the unexpected circumstances with the reservation system”.
The Hilton is the venue and the first-choice hotel for the week-long meeting. ICANN had negotiated a special rate for attendees.
It’s not the first snafu to hit a meeting hotel recently. Last October, the venue one of the hotels chosen for the meeting in Dakar, Senegal, was slammed as smelly, dirty and insecure by many delegates.
However, with regard to the Prague snafu, I’ve been unable to confirm whether ICANN has filed an official complaint with the Czech minister of telecommunications yet.
While DI is attending Prague, your humble reporter is not affected by the mix-up. I’ll be sleeping on public transport and doing my morning ablutions in McDonald’s as usual.

Will India’s biggest dot-brand be blocked?

TATA Group, the $83-billion-a-year Indian conglomerate, has confirmed to local media that it has applied for the new dot-brand top-level domain .tata.
Reporting on the approximately 50 new gTLD applications known so far to originate in India, the Business Standard confirmed the .tata bid.
But the company may find itself on the receiving end of nasty surprise — Tata is a protected geographical string under ICANN’s new gTLD rules.
Tata is also a Moroccan province listed in the ISO 3166-2 standard and the string is therefore recognized as a “sub-national place name” that gets special privileges.
Such strings are “considered geographic names and must be accompanied by documentation of support or non-objection from the relevant governments or public authorities”, according to the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
While it will be up to the Geographic Names Panel to make the call, “tata” looks to me like a pretty straightforward case of a protected string.
Has Tata obtained this consent from Morocco already? I guess we’ll find out on June 13, when ICANN reveals the public portions of all 1,900-plus new gTLD applications.
Tata also colloquially means “boob” in American.

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.”

Melbourne IT CEO calls for digital archery delay

Theo Hnarakis, CEO of top-ten registrar Melbourne IT, has asked ICANN to delay its imminent “digital archery” gTLD application batching system until a better solution can be found.
Talking to DI today, Hnarakis said he’s worried that digital archery currently favors applicants for desirable generic strings such as .web at the expense of uncontested dot-brands.
With a limited number of places per batch, and with ICANN currently promising to promote all contested applications to the batch containing the best archer, we’re potentially looking at a first batch dominated by contested gTLDs rather than dot-brands.
This, Hnarakis said, will lead to many more second-level defensive registrations by companies that have applied for dot-brand gTLDs but were placed in later batches.
“We’re going to have a situation where very many companies who said they’re going to apply [for a dot-brand] to get off the treadmill of being forced to protect their brand at the second level won’t be able to do so for a year or two years,” he said.
Without an alternative batching process, the new gTLD program risks looking like “another exercise in generating a lot of defensive registrations from brand holders”, he said.
Hnarakis has written (pdf) to the ICANN board of directors’ new gTLD program committee to express his concerns and to point out that when ICANN starts to review the program in 2014 it risks not being able to evaluate the benefits of the dot-brand concept.
He said he prefers a batching method that favors uncontested and uncontroversial strings.
By the time the new gTLD public comment period is over in August, ICANN should have a pretty good idea of which applications are controversial, he said. This would require some subjective decision-making, something ICANN has always resisted, he acknowledged.
He wants a delay to the digital archery process, which is currently scheduled to kick off next Friday, for further community discussions.
“There seems to be a broad sentiment that this isn’t this best method, but people don’t want to rock the boat because they don’t want to see any further delay,” Hnarakis said.
“I don’t care if there’s any further delay,” he said. “I just want to make sure… it’s done in a way that’s fair for all parties, brand holders particularly, and that ICANN comes out of it with some credibility.”
Melbourne IT is well-known for its digital brand management services. It has 146 new gTLD consulting clients, the vast majority of which are dot-brand applicants.

ARI confirms place in Big Four with 161 gTLD bids

ARI Registry Services has signed up to provide registry services for 161 new generic top-level domain applications.
The announcement this morning confirms that the domain name industry now has a Big Four – at least – set of dominant gTLD back-end providers.
ARI said it has signed 85 generic, 70 brand and 6 geographic gTLDs applications. CEO Adrian Kinderis said in a statement:

Non-disclosure statements restrict me from revealing our full client list at this point in time, but what I can say is that our technology will support some of the world’s largest and most recognised brands within the electronics, media, telecommunications, automotive and banking segments.

The company, part of the AusRegistry Group, was previously only known for its .au registry and some software consulting work on internationalized ccTLDs. It had expected 100 gTLD clients.
In Verisign’s most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, it has started identifying ARI as one of its key competitors, along with Neustar and Afilias.
Verisign is providing the back-end for 220 applications.
Neustar and Afilias have not yet announced their respective numbers. I expect both figures could quite easily be higher, but maybe not a great deal higher, than Verisign’s.
Top Level Domain Holdings also has not revealed numbers for Minds + Machines, but that’s a slightly different model due to the fact that M+M will also be the applicant in many cases.
With about 1,900 new gTLD applications filed, and barring any surprise back-end announcements, we could well be looking at hundreds of gTLD applications that propose a self-managed registry.