Neustar wins .gay contract

Neustrar has signed a deal to provide back-end registry services to DotGay LLC, one of the companies hoping to apply for .gay as a new top-level domain.
There are currently two companies planning to apply for .gay that I’m aware of. The other, the Dot Gay Alliance, has chosen Minds + Machines as its back-end partner.
The positioning is quite interesting. Scott Seitz, CEO of DotGay, played up the need for more security and stability in a TLD that may find itself the target of homophobic cyber-attacks.
In a press release due out tomorrow, Seitz says:

While security is always a concern for any gTLD, the GLBT community is at a higher risk of discrimination, making system integrity a critical component in the selection of a registry partner.

Neustar, which runs .biz and several other TLDs, has more experience running high-traffic registries than M+M. However, this fact will likely not be relevant to which company wins .gay.
Under the ICANN new TLDs program, applicants have to prove themselves capable of running a registry, but contested TLD applicants are not compared against each other based on technical prowess.
It’s much more likely that the two (or more) .gay applications will live or die based on community support or, failing that, how much money they are prepared to pay at auction.
The .gay TLD is likely to also be a flashpoint for controversy due to ongoing debates about governments’ ability to block TLDs based on “morality and public order” objections.
Recent mainstream media coverage has focused on .gay as a likely test case for governmental veto powers.

New TLD rulebook unlikely to get March nod

ICANN’s new top-level domains Applicant Guidebook is unlikely to get its final approval at ICANN’s March meeting, according to the senior staffer responsible for the program.
Senior vice president of stakeholder relations Kurt Pritz, who gave the keynote at today’s .nxt conference, later told me the Guidebook “probably won’t be approved in San Francisco”.
But impatient new TLD applicants may not have to wait too long afterward for the Guidebook to get the nod and the program to launch.
Pritz said that the Guidebook, currently in a “Proposed Final” version, will likely be revised following ICANN’s upcoming talks with its Governmental Advisory Committee.
But whatever emerges from the GAC consultation will not necessarily be opened for public comment, which would add a month or two of delay to the process. That will be for the board to decide.
Pritz indicated that the community needs to understand that one day ICANN will produce a version of the Guidebook that will be for voting, not commenting.
That’s likely to come sooner rather than later.
It seems to me to be quite likely that a version of the Guidebook emerging in the weeks following San Francisco will be submitted straight to the ICANN board of directors for approval.
During his keynote, which he gave following ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom’s unexpected eleventh-hour cancellation, Pritz said he wanted “to reset expectations and what I think our job is going forward”.
“Public discussion needs to turn to: should we launch the new gTLD process or should we not?” he said during his remarks.
The keynote was upbeat, talking about the Guidebook being a “road map”, not a series of “road blocks”.
Referring to the recently relaunched .me and .co country-code TLDs, which have been successfully marketed as generic TLDs, Pritz said:

To a certain extent new TLDs are already off and running. There’s a first mover advantage there, so the rest of us need to catch up.

ICANN chief cancels .nxt keynote

With the first-ever .nxt conference on new top-level domains just hours away from opening its doors, it looks like star speaker Rod Beckstrom has canceled his appearance.
ICANN’s president and CEO, who was featured prominently on the web site of the San Francisco conference as recently as Sunday, no longer appears on the agenda.
His keynote slot, scheduled for 10am local tomorrow, has been filled by Kurt Pritz, ICANN’s senior vice president of stakeholder relations and point man for the new TLD program.
While Pritz perhaps lacks the name recognition and stage presence of Beckstrom, it could be argued that his more granular insight into the program may actually make him a better-value speaker.
Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO Internet, is still scheduled for the second keynote, on Wednesday. Here’s hoping he can provide an update on .co’s post-Super Bowl performance.
UPDATE: Conference organizer Kieren McCarthy has confirmed that Beckstrom was unable to make it to San Francisco in time for the keynote, but said he may still attend later.

UDRP reform effort begins

ICANN has kicked off a review of its Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, the occasionally controversial process used to adjudicate cybersquatting complaints.
The GNSO Council on Thursday voted to ask ICANN staff for a so-called “Issues Report” on UDRP, indicating that reform of the process is likely.
This is the relevant portion of the resolution, passed unanimously:

RESOLVED #2, the GNSO Council requests an Issues Report on the current state of the UDRP. This effort should consider:
* How the UDRP has addressed the problem of cybersquatting to date, and any insufficiencies/inequalities associated with the process.
* Whether the definition of cybersquatting inherent within the existing UDRP language needs to be reviewed or updated. The Issue Report should include suggestions for how a possible PDP on this issue might be managed.

Issues Reports commissioned by the Council are expected within 15 days, and 15 days after that the Council is expected to vote on whether to kick off a Policy Development Process.
A PDP could lead to changes to the UDRP that would be binding on all ICANN-accredited registrars and their customers.
While the UDRP has proven very effective at dealing with clear-cut cases of cybersquatting over the last 12 years, critics claim that it is often interpreted too broadly in favor of trademark interests.
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I frequently report on unfathomable UDRP decisions, but these are generally the exception rather than the rule.
Unrelated to UDRP, the GNSO Council has also voted against asking ICANN for an Issues Report on registry/registrar best practices for mitigating domain abuse.
Business interests wanted registrars to take more measures (voluntarily) to curb activities such as phishing, but registrars think this kind of rule-making is beyond the scope of the GNSO.
After a lot of heated debate and arcane procedural wrangling, the Council decided instead to ask for a “discussion paper”, a term that has no meaning under ICANN’s rules, meaning a PDP is less likely.

Four more ICANN 40 sponsors revealed

Iron Mountain, IronDNS, RegistryPro and the Public Interest Registry have added their names to the list of companies prepared to fork out big bucks to sponsor ICANN’s San Francisco meeting.
That brings the total number of ICANN 40 sponsors revealed so far to five, after VeriSign’s unprecedented $500,000 “Diamond” deal.
The new sponsors have splashed out more modest fees. Of the six tiers of sponsorship available, all four have opted for least expensive two.
Iron Mountain, IronDNS and RegistryPro have all chosen the same tiers as they have before, but they are likely paying more since ICANN has doubled its list prices since last year.
Meanwhile, .org manager PIR has downgraded to a $25,000 “Silver” package, having been a “Gold” sponsor at the Cartagena meeting.
The deadline for signing sponsorship deals and handing over artwork is February 15.

ICANN chair expects more new TLDs delay

ICANN’s new top-level domains program is unlikely to be approved at its San Francisco meeting next month, according to chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.
“We don’t think we’ll be able to approve the final applicant guidebook in March,” he said in a new interview with World Trademark Review.
This confirms my suspicion that changes to the Guidebook made following the upcoming meeting between ICANN and its Governmental Advisory Committee may be too extensive for ICANN to rubber-stamp without first consulting the community.
The ICANN board and the GAC are due to meet in Brussels, February 28 and March 1, to discuss the GAC’s outstanding concerns.
Chief among these concerns is trademark protection, where the GAC is pretty much aligned with the interests of the intellectual property constituency.
Brussels will also cover matters such as geographic names protection and procedures for dealing with controversial strings that governments may want to object to.
While ICANN is under no obligation to adopt the GAC’s suggestions wholesale, if it makes substantial concessions its bylaws will likely demand more public comment on the changes.
ICANN’s board indicated last week that it plans to tell the GAC where it disagrees with its advice at a consultation March 17, one day before its San Francisco meeting.
It also said that it plans to approve a Guidebook “as close as practically possible to the form as set out in the Proposed Final Applicant Guidebook” published in November.
UPDATE: I had an opportunity to put Dengate Thrush’s comments to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom this afternoon. He said: “I’m not going to forecast when the final Applicant Guidebook will be approved.”

Details of ICANN’s government showdown emerge

Eight governments will face off against nine ICANN directors and an outside lawyer at the Governmental Advisory Committee showdown in Brussels at the end of the month.
That’s according to a draft agenda for the two-day bilateral meeting on new top-level domains, posted to an ICANN mailing list over the weekend.
The GAC’s 12 remaining concerns appear to have lumped together into eight thematic sessions, each of which is assigned one or more GAC reps, ICANN directors and staffers to “lead” the discussions.
The lead governments are: the US, UK, European Commission, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sri Lanka and Kenya. The US will lead or jointly lead three of the eight sessions.
Bruce Tonkin of Melbourne IT has been assigned the unenviable task of representing the ICANN board on the “morality and public order objections” issue, which the US government is currently trying to recast as a governmental right of veto over new TLDs.
Tonkin recently told ICANN’s GNSO Council that he believes Brussels will be focused on trying to understand the GAC’s current objections to new TLDs and help the GAC understand where ICANN has tried to take its previous advice into account.

If the GAC still does not believe that their advice has been heeded, the Board and GAC may discuss how the GAC advice could be taken into account in such a way that the interests of the overall ICANN community continue to be balanced.

He added that any “significant changes” proposed post-Brussels will likely be taken to the rest of the ICANN community for discussion at the San Francisco meeting, March 13.
Any changes proposed by the GAC would have to be “mutually agreeable between the GAC and the rest of the ICANN community”, he wrote.
The trademark protection discussion, likely to be one of the livelier sessions, will be led by the US, UK and Sri Lanka, with Rita Rodin Johnston, Ram Mohan and Gonzalo Navarro representing the board.
ICANN also plans to lawyer up. According to the document, the sole board lead on registry-registrar separation is Joe Sims, ICANN’s long-time outside counsel, a partner with the law firm Jones Day.

US wants veto power over new TLDs

The United States is backing a governmental power grab over ICANN’s new top-level domains program.
In a startling submission to the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee, a copy of which I have obtained, the US says that governments should get veto power over TLDs they are uncomfortable with:

Any GAC member may raise an objection to a proposed string for any reason. If it is the consensus position of the GAC not to oppose objection raised by a GAC member or members, ICANN shall reject the application.

In other words, if Uganda objected to .gay, Iran objected to .jewish, or Egypt objected to .twitter, and no other governments opposed those objections, the TLD applications would be killed off.
The fate of TLDs representing marginal communities or controversial brands could well end up subject to back-room governmental horse-trading, rather than the objective, transparent, predictable process the ICANN community has been trying to create for the last few years.
The amendments the US is calling for would also limit the right to object to a TLD on “morality” grounds to members of the GAC, while the current Applicant Guidebook is much broader.
The rationale for these rather Draconian proposals is stability and “universal resolvability”.
The worry seems to be that if some nations start blocking TLDs, they may well also decide to start up their own rival DNS root, fragmenting the internet (and damaging the special role the US has in internet governance today).
The US also wants TLDs such as “.bank” or “.pharmacy” more closely regulated (or blocked altogether) and wants “community” applications more strictly defined.
In the current ICANN Applicant Guidebook, any applicant can designate their application “community-based”, in order to potentially strengthen its chances against rival bids.
But the US wants the Guidebook amended to contain the following provisions:

“Community-based strings” include those that purport to represent or that embody a particular group of people or interests based on historical components of identity (such as nationality, race or ethnicity, religion or religious affiliation, culture or particular social group, and/or a language or linguistic group). In addition, those strings that refer to particular sectors, in particular those subject to national regulation (such as .bank, .pharmacy) are also “community-based” strings.
…
In the event the proposed string is either too broad to effectively identify a single entity as the relevant authority or appropriate manager, or is sufficiently contentious that an appropriate manager cannot be identified and/or agreed, the application should be rejected.

In practice, this could potentially kill off pretty much every vertical TLD you can think of, such as .bank, .music and .hotel. How many industries have a “single entity” overseeing them globally?
While the goal appears to be noble – nobody wants a .bank or .pharma managed by hucksters – the Community Objection procedure in the Guidebook arguably already provides protection here.
The US also wants the policy allowing the vertical integration of registries and registrars reining in, for TLD applicants to justify the costs their domains will incur on others, and a dramatic overhaul of the trademark protection mechanisms in the Guidebook.
In short, the US wants the new TLDs program substantially overhauled, in ways that are certain to draw howls of protest from many in the ICANN community.
The document does not appear to be official GAC policy yet. It could well be watered down before the GAC meets the ICANN board in Brussels at the end of February.
ICANN said earlier this week that it plans to approve a Guidebook “as close as practically possible” to the current draft, and heavily hinted that it wants to do so at its San Francisco meeting in March.
But if many of the US recommendations were to make it through Brussels, that’s a deadline that could be safely kissed goodbye.

Porn set to steal the show in San Francisco

ICM Registry’s .xxx top-level domain looks set to grab the headlines at ICANN’s meeting in San Francisco, due to government-forced delays.
While ICANN is hoping to approve its new top-level domains program in March, that decision may wind up receiving less media attention than the final approval of the porn-only domain.
ICANN last month said that it wanted to hold a final consultation to resolve its differences with the Governmental Advisory Committee – which broadly objects to .xxx – in February 2011.
This referred to a proposed meeting between the GAC and the board, which has now been officially scheduled for February 28 in Brussels.
But a resolution carried by ICANN this week has pushed the consultation back to “no later than Thursday 17 March, 2011”, the day before its San Francisco meeting.
That would put the sign-off of ICM’s contract on the same billing as the planned final approval of the new top-level domains Applicant Guidebook and the launch of the new TLDs program.
San Francisco is set to be the focus of unprecedented media attention, due to its location and the likely presence of Bill Clinton. We’re probably looking at tighter stage management than usual.
With that in mind, I expect ICANN bosses won’t be too happy that porn-friendly .xxx is likely to steal away many column inches they would prefer devoted to new TLDs.
Porn in headlines gets clicks. Readers understand it, and you generally don’t need to explain to an editor what a TLD is. I know which story would be easier for me to sell.
Had ICANN put .xxx on the agenda for Brussels – which does not appear to have been ruled out yet – it could have wrapped up the ICM saga with a resolution quite quickly afterward.
That would have given ICM a week or so of undiluted media coverage, and the new TLDs program would not have had to share the spotlight with porn come San Francisco.
The question is: why is .xxx apparently not on the agenda for Brussels? Given ICANN’s previous decision to hold the meeting in February, responsibility seems to lie with the GAC.
Rumor has it that there’s a bit of a power struggle going on behind the scenes, with some elements of the GAC resistant to make Brussels the official final .xxx consultation.
Time will tell whether this position is firm or flexible.

ICANN sets March deadline for new TLDs

ICANN appears determined to put debates about its new top-level domains program to bed at its San Francisco meeting in March.
The resolutions from Tuesday’s ICANN board meeting, published this evening, give every indication that ICANN wants an end to the delays.
This seems to mean it will take a hard line with its Governmental Advisory Committee, with which it is due to meet in Brussels at the end of February.
The board resolved that it “intends to progress toward launching the New gTLD Program, as close as practically possible to the form as set out in the Proposed Final Applicant Guidebook.”
It remains open, however, to take action on the GAC’s concerns, which include trademark protection and the treatment of geographic strings.
It wants the final GAC consultation, which is mandated by its bylaws, to take place March 17, the day before the board meets in San Francisco.
This is encouraging news for anybody who wants to apply for a new TLD, as it means ICANN would be able to launch the program shortly thereafter.
If that happens, it could be able to start accepting applications possibly as early as mid-July (although a late-August/early September window may be more likely).
More on this tomorrow.