.XXX demands approval in Brussels

ICM Registry has called on ICANN to quickly give final approval to its .xxx top-level domain contract after its meeting with governments next month.
Company president Stuart Lawley, in a letter to ICANN (pdf), said ICM has “invested extraordinary resources” in its TLD proposal and has waited almost seven years to get into the DNS root.
Its hopes of getting the nod from ICANN’s board of directors in Cartagena last month were dashed, when it was decided that a final consultation with the Governmental Advisory Committee was required.
That consultation is set to take place in Brussels at the end of February (although ICANN’s announcement of the meeting last Friday conspicuously made no mention of .xxx).
Lawley writes:

ICM Registry urges the ICANN Board to fulfill its explicit commitments to ICM Registry and to the ICANN community, and to uphold the integrity of the ICANN process by conducting and completing its consultations with the GAC
…
Neither ICM Registry nor the ICANN community can be expected to stand by while ICANN allows yet another self-imposed deadline on this matter to come and go without a plausible explanation.

The letter notes that it’s almost a year since ICANN’s Independent Review Panel told the organization that, despite its protestations to the contrary, .xxx had already been approved.
Lawley tells me ICM is spending, on average, $100,000 a month to keep the company ticking over. He believes that the proposed registry contract has dealt with all of the GAC’s concerns.
The one concern it will never be able to avoid, of course, is that .xxx is for porn, and there are plenty of governments (be they Middle Eastern theocracies, communist Asian states or conservative Western democracies) opposed to porn in principle.
The GAC said in an official Communique in 2006 that “several members of the GAC are emphatically opposed from a public policy perspective to the introduction of a .xxx sTLD.”
As far as I can tell, that’s pretty much the only major stumbling block remaining before ICM can sign a registry contract.
UK GAC rep Mark Carvell told me yesterday that the GAC believes the 2006 statement constitutes “advice” that ICANN is duty-bound to take into account, even though it was not a consensus GAC position.
In my opinion, ICANN has no choice but to disregard this advice.
If we suddenly start living in a world where the public policies of a handful of backward nations are sufficient to veto a TLD, then we may as well pack up the whole internet and move it to Saudi Arabia or Utah.

Governments to take trademark concerns to ICANN

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee will head to Brussels next month determined to persuade ICANN to strengthen the trademark protections in its new top-level domains program.
The GAC is set to take many of the concerns of the trademark lobby to its meeting with ICANN’s board of directors, UK GAC representative Mark Carvell said in an interview today.
“It’s very important that the interests of trademark holders are fully respected and that the costs that might flow to them are mitigated as much as possible,” he said.
“Their interests should not be undermined in any way that creates unnecessary burdens for them – it interferes with trade, business development and so on.”
The GAC is currently working on 12 “scorecards” that enumerate its concerns with the Applicant Guidebook for new TLDs, as well as more “overarching” issues with the program.
Carvell has been charged with writing the scorecard on trademark protection. He recently met with several large brand interests in London, as World Trademark Review reported last week.
I get the impression that the GAC’s position will be less hard-line than some of the IP lawyers WTR quoted, who want a wholesale return to their proposals of two years ago.
One protection the IP lobby wants restored to the Guidebook is the Globally Protected Marks List, which would take a lot of the cost out of defensive registrations in new TLDs.
The GPML was proposed by brand holders, but did not make it into the current version of the Guidebook.
“Whether we can simply go back to that, I doubt, but we may discuss it,” Carvell said. “I’d be hesitant to simply revert to a set of proposals that did not get full support.”
He added that protections granted in the launches of .eu and .co – which had a Specially Protected Marks List similar to the GPML – could also provide the basis for discussion.
Another protection, the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy, designed to allow trademark holders to quickly block blatant cases of cybersquatting, has been watered down quite a lot since its first iteration.
“The URS does not achieve its original objectives,” Carvell said. The GAC will push for it to be strengthened, not fundamentally revisited, he said.
“We don’t want the Trademark Clearinghouse completely remodeled, we’re not looking for the URS to be totally reshaped, we want to work with ICANN to improve these mechanisms,” he said.
The two-day Brussels meeting, scheduled for February 28, will not all be about trademarks, of course. Other issues include geographical name protection and the treatment of “controversial” strings.
There’s a feeling in some parts of the GAC that TLDs deemed so controversial they they are likely to be blocked by certain nations (think .sex, .gay etc) should be given an “early warning” dissuading them from continuing with their applications.
Unsurprisingly (given its role in overseeing the DNS root) but ironically (given its First Amendment) it is the US GAC representative who has been assigned work on this particular scorecard.
It seems to me that the list of concerns the GAC will take to Brussels is going to be quite substantial. We’re likely not talking about only minor edits to the Guidebook.
While ICANN may feel under some pressure to officially launch the new TLDs program at the close of its splashy San Francisco meeting in March, it’s my growing feeling that this may not be realistic.
If the GAC gets even half of what it intends to ask for, ICANN’s rules could well call for another public comment period before it can sign off on the Applicant Guidebook.
Carvell said that the GAC is very sensitive to the concerns of applicants, eager to launch their TLDs, saying the GAC has been placed “in a very unfortunate position”.
“Nobody wants this to go beyond San Francisco,” he said. “One would hope not, but we can’t rule out that possibility.”
He suggested that some of the GAC’s issues could be deferred in the interests of timing.
Trademark and geographic string protections refer directly to the content of the Guidebook, but other issues, such as economic analysis and supporting applications from developing countries, do not.
“It may be that some of these issues could be further explored and discussed in parallel with the launch,” he said, noting that there’s a four-month buffer period envisioned between the approval of the Guidebook and the opening of the first round of applications.

New TLDs may face more GAC delay

ICANN has finally confirmed the date for its groundbreaking meeting with its Governmental Advisory Committee, and it doesn’t look like great news for new top-level domain applicants.
The GAC and ICANN’s board of directors will meet for a two-day consultation in Brussels, starting February 28, according to an announcement late yesterday.
Attendees will be tasked with identifying the problems the GAC still has with the Applicant Guidebook, and trying to resolve as many as possible.
The devil is in the detail, however. ICANN stated:

This meeting is not intended to address the requirements/steps outlined in the Bylaws mandated Board-GAC consultation process.

This means that, post-Brussels, a second GAC consultation will be required before the ICANN board will be able to approve the Guidebook.
Under ICANN’s bylaws, when it disagrees with the GAC, it has to first state its reasons, and then they must “try, in good faith and in a timely and efficient manner, to find a mutually acceptable solution.”
ICANN appears to have now confirmed that it has not yet invoked this part of the bylaws, and that Brussels will not be the “mutually acceptable solution” meeting.
The best case scenario, if you’re an impatient new TLD applicant, would see the second consultation take place during the San Francisco meeting, which kicks off March 13.
The board would presumably have to convene a special quickie meeting, in order to officially invoke the bylaws, at some point during the two weeks between Brussels and San Francisco.
That scenario is not impossible, but it’s not as desirable as putting the GAC’s concerns to bed in Brussels, which is what some applicants had hoped and expected.
The GAC is currently writing up a number of “scorecards” that enumerate its outstanding concerns with the Guidebook.
Mark Carvell, the UK representative, has been tasked with writing the scorecard for trademark protection. Other scorecards will likely also discuss, for example, the problem of objecting to TLD applications on “morality and public order” grounds.
ICANN’s board, meanwhile, is due to meet this coming Tuesday to agree upon the “rules of engagement” for handling disagreements with the GAC under its bylaws.
When these rules are published, we should have a better idea of how likely a San Francisco approval of the Applicant Guidebook is.
Surprisingly, the ICANN announcement yesterday makes no mention of ICM Registry’s .xxx TLD application, which is the only area where the board has officially invoked the bylaws with regards the GAC’s objections.
The Brussels meeting, ICANN said, will be open to observers, transcribed live, and webcast.

What O.co says about new TLDs

Overstock.com’s shock rebranding move yesterday is not only a big marketing coup for .CO Internet, it also may be good news for new top-level domains in general.
In a pair of US TV commercials (available here and here if you’re overseas) Overstock has started calling itself O.co, the domain it bought privately from the .co registry for $350,000 last July.
When I wrote, last November, “Overstock’s .com domain is its brand, and that’s not about to change”, I may well have been wrong. Go to overstock.com and look at the logo.
This is good evidence, if it were needed, that the very same trademark interests currently opposed to ICANN’s new TLDs program are also keenly aware of the benefits.
Overstock has had its eyes on O.com for over five years, and fought unsuccessfully within ICANN to have single-letter .com domains released from the VeriSign reserved list.
It was not until .co relaunched last summer – essentially a new TLD – that Overstock got the opportunity to register a domain (almost?) as good as the one it wanted.
I find this interesting because Overstock, like many other major brand owners, has been a vocal opponent of new TLDs.
In a July 2009 letter to ICANN (pdf), for example, Overstock expresses many of the same views about new TLDs that are still being expressed by the trademark interests currently holding up the program.
I’m not suggesting that Overstock’s eagerness to use O.co negates its specific criticisms of the new TLDs program, but its conflicting behavior does seem to suggest a certain degree of cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, it opposed new TLDs. But when a new TLD launched, it grasped the opportunity with both hands and rebranded the whole company around it.
If what I hear is true, many of the companies publicly opposed to new TLDs are also the ones simultaneously investigating their own “.brand” domains.
Could Overstock’s latest move represent a pent-up demand for new TLDs among big brands? What does that mean for the future of .com as the internet’s premium real estate?

Surge in new domain registrars

ICANN is seeing a spike in newly accredited domain name registrars.
Since the start of the year, the organization has approved 16 new companies, compared to only about 40 in the whole of 2010.
About half a dozen of the new registrars appear to belong to domain investor Andrew Reberry of TurnCommerce, which owns domains such as Glossary.com, Bulldozers.com and Fluff.com.
Many of the others were accredited yesterday and have very generic registrar names, such as Host Name Services Inc, International Registration Services Inc and Online Name Services Inc.
There are no web sites associated with this latest batch yet, but I’d be surprised if many turn out to have sought accreditation with customer-facing domain services in mind.
This is pure speculation, but I wonder if any of this may be related to ICANN’s recent decision to loosen the restrictions on cross-ownership between registrars and registries.
If and when ICANN opens up its new top-level domains program to applications, which could happen as soon as August, potential registries will also be allowed to own registrars.
Could the market for flipping accredited companies return? It’s happened before, but it may not be the most efficient or economical way of achieving accreditation nowadays.
The uptick in newly approved registrars may of course just be an anomaly.

Eleven new ccTLDs coming next week

ICANN is set to approve 11 new internationalized domain name ccTLDs, representing four nations in Asia and the Middle East, at its board meeting next week.
On the January 25 consent agenda – which is typically rubber-stamped without discussion – is the approval of IDN ccTLDs for South Korea, India, Singapore and Syria.
Korea is due to get .한국, Singapore gets . 新加坡 (Chinese) and .சிங்கப்பூர் (Tamil), while Syria gets the Arabic string .سورية.
Massively polyglot India will be delegated its ccTLD in seven of its most-popular languages.
The delegations will push the number of TLDs in IANA’s database to over 300 for the first time.
This week, the ccTLD for Thailand went live with Thai-language registrations under .ไทย. You can watch a video of ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom congratulating the nation here.
Also on ICANN’s agenda next week is the re-delegation of the ASCII ccTLDs for Burkina Faso, Congo and Syria – .bf, .cd and .sy respectively – to new registry managers.

Banks to write security rules for “.bank”

Financial services firms unhappy with ICANN’s new top-level domains program are to take matters into their own hands by writing security guidelines for TLDs like “.bank”.
BITS, the technology policy arm of the Financial Services Roundtable, said it plans to develop “elevated security standards for financial gTLDs” and wants ICANN to make them mandatory.
The organization, which counts many major world banks as members, is concerned that a “.bank” in the hands of a registry with lax security could increase fraud and reduce confidence in banking online.
BITS said its guidelines would be drafted by a globally diverse working group and submitted to an international standards-setting organization for ratification.
It wants ICANN to include a single sentence in its new TLDs Applicant Guidebook, apparently incorporating the guidelines by reference:

Evaluators will use standards published by the financial services industry to determine if the applicant’s proposed security approach is commensurate with the level of trust necessary for financial services gTLDs.

An ICANN working group is working on the concept of a High Security Zone TLD for precisely this kind of application, but in September the ICANN board abruptly decided that it “will not be certifying or enforcing” the idea, apparently in order to mitigate its own corporate risk.
The BITS project appears to be in direct response to that move.
It certainly seems to be a more productive avenue of engagement than hinting at a lawsuit, which it did in a November letter to ICANN.
I’m attempting to confirm whether the BITS plan, submitted as a response to the Applicant Guidebook public comment period, is being proposed with ICANN’s backing. (UPDATE: it isn’t.)

No cheap TLDs for poor countries

Applicants in the developing world that hoped to get a new top-level domain on the cheap will be disappointed after proposals to help subsidize their applications were watered down.
The ICANN GNSO Council last week voted against measures that could have reduced application fees or asked ICANN set up an aid fund for applicants from poor nations.
ICANN’s application fee for a single TLD is $185,000, but it is widely expected to cost most applicants at least double or triple that, once add-on fees and consulting costs are taken into account.
While this is not a lot of money if you’re a big corporation, it’s a substantial barrier to entry if you’re an entrepreneur or community initiative from a poorer country.
So for several months an ICANN working group known as JAS, for Joint Applicant Support, has been working on ideas for how ICANN and others can support less wealthy applicants.
The group wanted to do further work to establish ways to subsidize the application fee, set up an ICANN fund using revenue from TLD auctions, and negotiate registry-level support.
But the GNSO Council voted those ideas down last Thursday, ostensibly on the basis that they were too far-reaching and “beyond the scope of the GNSO” to approve.
The vote was split roughly along party lines, with almost all of the support for the broader motions coming from non-commercial stakeholders.
Business interests such as registrars, registries, ISPs and intellectual property stakeholders voted in favor of a more “limited” set of objectives.
Proponents of the new limited charter tell me that they remain supportive of the work of the JAS, but that they did not believe it has the expertise to carry out such far-reaching work.
I suspect that commercial factors also played a role. For example, the JAS wanted to:

Discuss with Backend Registry Service Providers the extent of coordination, to be given by Backend Registry Service Providers (e.g. brokering the relationships, reviewing the operational quality of the relationship) and propose methods for coordinating that assistance

But the registry-supported replacement resolution, which was approved, asks the JAS to instead:

Propose methods for applicants to seek out assistance from registry service providers.

References to reduced application fees for needy applicants, and to the need for an ICANN-supported fund, were cut entirely.
The changes received majority support on the Council, but were not universally welcomed. Former Council chair Avri Doria called it “neocolonialism”, and wrote on her blog:

The only kind of aid the JAS WG is allowed to work on is aid that makes a applicant from a developing economy beholden and subject to the control of an incumbent or an expert.

Because the JAS working group was a joint effort of the GNSO and At Large Advisory Committee, it now has two charters – one broad, one narrow – and it’s not entirely clear how its work will proceed.
But it does seem that the $185,000 application fee is here to stay, no matter where you come from.

Network Solutions will sell .xxx domains

Network Solutions has become the first big-name registrar to show that it will support the proposed .xxx top-level domain.
This page has recently appeared on the NSI site, accessible from the company’s home page through the link “.xxx Coming Soon”.
NSI appears confident that ICANN will approve the TLD soon:

.XXX will be launching shortly and Network Solutions is working with ICM Registry to provide informational services for our customers that wish to take advantage of the launch and register domain names.

The TLD is currently being tied up by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, but many believe it’s likely to be a shoo-in at the San Francisco meeting in March or sooner.

Cute sees .org’s future in new TLDs

The Public Interest Registry sees new top-level domains as an opportunity to strengthen the .org brand as well as add new TLDs to its stable, according to newly appointed CEO Brian Cute.
“We have the new round of gTLDs opening up soon, and I see that as genuinely an opportunity for PIR, so a lot of our strategic focus will be there,” Cute said in an interview.
Internationalized domain name TLDs will play a major role in this strategy. Cute said that “expanding .org into the IDN world” will be the key focus.
While PIR plans to apply to ICANN for several IDN variants of .org, there’s less interest in expanding into ASCII strings or outside of the company’s “public interest” mission.
“We not particularly looking at that opportunity,” Cute said.
He also believes that the large number of new TLDs ICANN is expected to authorize could actually strengthen .org as a brand.
“There will be lots of new entrants, lots of new competition,” he said. “The environment will be one where if we play our cards right, we’ll be able to be successful and in fact flourish.”
Cute was named CEO of PIR earlier today. Previously, he worked at Afilias, a close partner, so his learning curve at his new employer will be relatively gentle.
He said he doesn’t plan to shake things up much.
“I don’t see any need to make any major course corrections to our strategy,” he said. “It’s now a matter of execution. There will be new competition so we will have to execute well.”