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.

DotGreen calls it quits with “impossible” gTLD auction looming

DotGreen, the first public and easily most visible applicant for the new gTLD .green, has withdrawn its application, saying it has become “impossible” to continue.
In a statement sent to DI tonight, founder and CEO Annalisa Roger said:

While DotGreen supported the New gTLD program, we believe we exhausted all options within the framework of the New gTLD applicant guidebook and the multi-stakeholder model for procuring .green management. DotGreen remains locked in contention facing an auction among three registry competitors from the Internet industry. Unfortunately it is impossible for DotGreen to proceed within these circumstances.
Today we withdrew DotGreen Community, Inc.’s application for the .green TLD.

DotGreen was founded in 2007 and had built up a small following of supporting environmental organizations. A charitable organization, the plan was to use the proceeds from the registry to fund worthy projects.
A prominent applicant from well before the ICANN application window opened, it held regular eco-themed events during ICANN meetings and even recruited its CFO/COO, Tim Switzer, from its back-end provider, Neustar.
(Switzer is chair of the New gTLD Applicants Group, NTAG, but is expected to resign as a result of the withdrawal.)
But it’s facing competition for .green from portfolio applicants Demand Media, Afilias, and Top Level Domain Holdings.
“It is tough for a single-string applicant,” Roger said. “An auction, sorry, it’s not the appropriate scenario for the .green TLD for several reasons. It really the undermines the authenticity and the faith that the community has put in us and the multi-stakeholder model.”
There’s no way the company could win at auction against three big portfolio applicants, she said.
Despite the company name, DotGreen Community’s application was not a “Community” application under ICANN rules and the only way out of contention was going to be private settlement or auction.
It also faced the uncertainty of Governmental Advisory Committee advice, which had classified the string as requiring extra safeguards for “consumer protection” purposes, causing indefinite delays.
It seems the final decision was financial — the cost of delays and an auction too much for the start-up to bear. It’s a pity really — there was some genuine enthusiasm for the cause behind this bid.
The .green gTLD will now go to which one of the remaining three applicants stumps up the most cash at auction.

More Extended Evaluation passes this week

Four new gTLD applications passed Extended Evaluation this week, and two that were stuck in Initial Evaluation finally made it through, ICANN just revealed.
The Extended Evaluation successes were DotPay’s application for .pay, Commercial Connect’s application for .shop, CompassRose.life’s application for .life and GED Domains’ application for .ged.
The dot-brands .adac (Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club) and .jio (Affinity Names) passed IE.
Commercial Connect is notable for being 2000-round applicant trying again. It failed on its technical evaluation first time through.

Third Bulgarian new gTLDs conference planned

Domain Forum, the Bulgarian new gTLDs conference, will run for a third time on November 1 in Sofia.
The one-day event, which will be free to attend and conducted in English, will have a focus this year on Cyrillic internationalized domain names, according to organizers.
Much of the agenda has yet to be finalized but confirmed speakers include consultant Stephane Van Gelder, Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon and Afilias business development director Francesco Cetraro.
Organizer UNINET also hopes to have an ICANN VP keynoting.
Domain Forum will take place at the National Palace of Culture in central Sofia.

Domain Name Association opens membership

The new Domain Name Association, which hopes to represent the interests of the domain name industry as a whole, has opened its doors to new members.
The DNA formed in January, named an interim board in April, and has spent the last several months conducting outreach and establishing its corporate structure, goals and membership rules.
Membership prices range from $1,000 to $50,000, with the make-up of the final board (estimated to be fewer than 20 directors) determined by which companies pay for the more expensive membership tiers.
Paying $50,000 will guarantee you a seat on the board, for example, while paying $5,000 makes your company eligible for, but not guaranteed, one of two reserved seats.
Speaking at the Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress in London two weeks ago, interim DNA chair Adrian Kinderis made no bones about the fact that the DNA is pay-to-play; it’s “not a democracy”.
It’s a trade group in the usual sense, in other words, borrowing nothing from ICANN’s multistakeholder model.
That said, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade encouraged its creation and ICANN seems to generally support its goal.
That goal is to represent the entire domain name industry — registrars, registries, resellers, etc. Its mission statement is pretty succinct:

Promote the interest of the domain name industry by advocating the use, adoption, and expansion of domain names as the primary tool for users to navigate the Internet.

Promoting new gTLDs is its first priority.
The DNA operates two web sites: thedna.org for its members and whatdomain.org for internet end users.

Some gTLD applicants welcome ICANN’s clash plan

Some new gTLD applicants, including two of the bigger portfolio applicants, have grudgingly accepted ICANN’s latest name collisions remediation plan as a generally positive development.
ICANN this week scrapped its three-tier categorization of applications, implicitly accepting that it was based on a flawed risk analysis, and instead said new gTLDs can be delegated without delay if the registries promise to block every potentially impacted second-level domain.
You may recall that yesterday dotShabaka Registry said on DI that the plan was a “dog’s breakfast” and criticized ICANN for not taking more account of applicants’ comments.
But others are more positive, if not exactly upbeat, welcoming the opportunity to avoid the six-month delays ICANN’s earlier mitigation plan would have imposed on many strings.
Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling congratulated ICANN for reframing the debate, in light of Verisign’s ongoing campaign to persuade everyone that name collisions will be hugely risky. He told DI:

There has been a great deal of FUD surrounding name collisions from incumbent registry operators who are trying to negatively shape the utility of the new gTLDs they will be competing against.
I think it was important for ICANN to take control of the conversation in the name of common sense. These types of collisions are ultimately minor in the grand scheme and they occur each and every day in existing namespaces like .com, without the internet melting down.
I think anything that shapes conversation in a way that accelerates the process and sides with common sense is good, I have not yet thought of how this latest change can be gamed to the downside of new G’s.

Uniregistry has 51 remaining new gTLD applications, 20 of which were categorized as “uncalculated risk” and faced considerable delays under ICANN’s original plan.
Schilling’s take was not unique among applicants we talked on and off the record.
Top Level Domain Holdings is involved with 77 current applications as back-end provider — and as applicant in most of them — and also faced “uncalculated” delay on many.
CEO Antony Van Couvering welcomed ICANN’s plan less than warmly and raised questions about the future studies it plans to conduct, criticizing ICANN’s apparent lack of trust in its community:

Basically the move is positive. I characterize it as getting out of jail in exchange for some community service — definitely a trade I’ll make.
On the other hand, the decision betrays ICANN’s basic lack of confidence in its own staff and in the ICANN community. You can see this in the vagueness of the study parameters, because it’s not at all clear what the consultant will be studying or what criteria will be used to make any recommendations — or indeed if anything can be said beyond mere data collection.
But more important, they are hiring an outside consultant when the world’s experts on the subject are all here already, many willing to work for free. ICANN either doesn’t think it can trust its community and/or doesn’t know how to engage them. So they punt on the issue and hire a consultant. It’s a behavior you can see in poorly-run companies anywhere, and it’s discouraging for ICANN’s future.

Similar questions were posed and answered by ICANN’s former new gTLD program supremo Kurt Pritz, in a comment on DI last night. Pritz is now an independent consultant working with new gTLD applicants and others.
He speculated that ICANN’s main concern is not appeasing Verisign and its new allies in the Association of National Advertisers, but rather attempting to head off future governmental interference.
Apparently speaking on his own behalf, Pritz wrote:

The greatest concern is the big loss: some well-spoken individual going to the US Congress or the European Commission and saying, “those lunatics are about to delegate dangerous TLDs, there will be c-o-l-l-i-s-i-o-n-s!!!” All the self-interested parties (acting rationally self-interested) will echo that complaint.
And someone in a governmental role will listen, and the program might be at jeopardy.
So ICANN is taking away all the excuses of those claiming technical risk. By temporarily blocking ALL of the SLDs seen in the day-in-the-life data and by putting into place a process to address new SLD queries that might raise a risk of harm, ICANN is delegating TLDs that are several orders of magnitude safer on this issue than all of the hundreds of TLDs that have already been delegated.

Are you a new gTLD applicant? What do you think? Is ICANN’s plan good news for you?

dotShabaka Diary — Day 17, Collisions plan is a dog’s breakfast

The seventeenth installment of dotShabaka Registry’s journal, charting its progress towards becoming one of the first new gTLDs to go live, written by general manager Yasmin Omer.

Thursday 10 October 2013
As regular readers of this journal will know, we have been frustrated by the lack of certainty surrounding the new gTLD program.
Other industries would have picketed the building of the regulator with suitably angry placards being waved and a catchy song. Unfortunately in the domain name industry, angry blogs serve as a replacement to chaining ourselves to Fadi’s swivel chair.
So as a compromise, I ask readers to hum their favourite protest tune while reading our latest tale of woe.
Flippant commentary aside, the document ICANN released on name collisions yesterday (New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management) is a perfect example of what many applicants find challenging about ICANN staff’s use of the public comment process.
Despite the many detailed studies undertaken by a number of applicants and reported through the public comment process, it would appear that many of the recommendations or proposed solutions have been ignored by ICANN staff and the NGPC in favour of something that resembles a ‘dog’s breakfast’.
You’ll recall that ICANN made some suggestions to mitigate the risk of name collisions. There were three categories: High (dead men walking), Uncategorised (deer in headlights) and Low (phew ).
There was going to be a study about something at sometime that would decide stuff and the aforementioned deer would roam free. There was going to be a TLD tasting period during which time registries got to play spammer to unsuspecting ISPs (I wonder if I can get a refund like domain tasters used to, if I don’t get enough traffic?).
A comment period was had and people duly commented. Neither the original suggestions nor the comments seem to have any connection with what appeared in the document we read yesterday. The actions and processes discussed in the document are completely new. Oh, and the Board approved them.
A thought for those in the industry: are we so inured to this kind of procedural disdain that one more example simply doesn’t make us angry anymore?
So what of the document? Is it good for us and the industry? Well there is no low or uncategorised risk grouping anymore. Everyone is in the same bucket of riskiness. Depending on who you are, that might be good for you.
The TLD tasting period, where a TLD was delegated and emails were sent to every poor soul who made the mistake of looking up a non-existing TLD, is gone. That is definitely good. An outreach program with network operators and ISPs seems like an eminently sensible idea. A spam campaign chasing random DNS queries seems like a mad idea.
Now to the grim news – there will be another study (isn’t there always) and another process (if it’s implementation can we just… oh never mind).
The study will tell us which strings from the DITL data set (and other unnamed sets) are risky and why and what we should do with them. Such risk will be contextual to the TLD in question. There’s no detail on how many strings we are talking about. There’s no criteria for the string’s presence in the list (number of queries, type of queries, known risks etc). That sounds like a large chunk of work. No matter how it is automated.
The process to be determined is how the strings and suggested mitigations are delivered to and managed by registries. There’s potentially a lot of future system development and labour costs on the horizon for TLD operators.
Many TLDs will not need to wait for this completed work to delegate. However they must accept from ICANN a list of names they can’t delegate until the process/study and their personalised list of names is completed.
Firstly ICANN has to decide if you can take this option up. How will they do that you ask? I would point you to the very clear decision tree located within the document, only it appears to have been left out. Coming soon.
Second, ICANN has to create and send you the standby extra cautious list. Now we are getting nervous. Just how many names will be on this list? Will there be any filtering or common sense applied? Is the extra cautious list subject to comment? Does it exist already?
There’s also a new process that allows someone who suffers harm from the delegation of a second level domain to have it blocked for a period of up to 2 years. When one thinks through such a process it seems most likely that this harm is only determined after the delegation, not prior. Therefore Registries may be in a position where they need to un-delegate a domain already in use by a registrant.
That could be a rude shock to some innocent registrants. The principle of doing this bothers us. The practical and legal implication of doing this bothers us. And the lack of any detail around how this process is managed, most definitely bothers us.
Whenever I hear process and study I also hear delay. In fact the modus operandi of those opposing the gTLD program has not been to fight it, but to suggest one more study and another process, knowing the effect such activities will have.
So here we are, certain in our uncertainty that one day – soon or not so soon – we will be delegated.
We can’t be the only ones who have internal jokes about the randomness of ICANN policy development. They help us make light of the otherwise business crippling proclamations we receive with no warning.
Don’t you wish, just for once, those jokes weren’t so true?

Read previous and future diary entries here.

New gTLD applicants get a way to avoid name collision delay

ICANN has given blessed relief to many new gTLD applicants by wiping potentially months off their path to delegation.
Its New gTLD Program Committee this week adopted a new “New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan” which aims to tackle the problem of clashes between new gTLDs and names used on private networks.
The good news is that the previous categorization of strings according to risk, which would have delayed “uncalculated risk” gTLDs by months pending further study, has been scrapped.
The two “high risk” strings — .home and .corp — don’t catch a break, however. ICANN says it will continue to refuse to delegate them “indefinitely”.
For everyone else, ICANN said it will conduct additional studies into the risk of name collisions, above and beyond what Interisle Consulting already produced.
The study will take into account not only the frequency that new gTLDs currently generate NXDOMAIN traffic in the DNS root, but also the number of second-level domains queried, the diversity of requesting sources, and other factors.
Any new gTLD applicant that does not wish to wait for this study will be able to proceed to delegation without delay, but only if they block huge numbers of second-level domains at launch.
The registries will have to block every SLD that was queried in their gTLD according to the Day in the Life of the Internet data that Interisle used in its study.
This list will vary by TLD, but in the most severe cases is likely to extend to tens of thousands of names. In many cases, it’s likely to be a few thousand names.
Fortunately, studies conducted by the likes of Donuts and Neustar indicate that many of these SLDs — maybe even the majority — are likely to be invalid strings, such as those with an underscore or other non-DNS character, or randomly generated 10-character strings of gibberish generated by Google Chrome.
In other words, the actual number of potentially salable domains that registries will have to block may turn out to be much lower than it appears at first glance.
Each SLD will have to be blocked in such a way that it continues to return NXDOMAIN responses, as they all do today.
Because the DITL data represented a 48-hour snapshot in May 2013, and may not include every potentially affected string, ICANN is also proposing to give organizations a way to:

report and request the blocking of a domain name (SLD) that causes demonstrably severe harm as a consequence of name collision occurrences.
…
The process will allow the deactivation (SLD removal from the TLD zone) of the name for a period of up to two (2) years in order to allow the affected party to effect changes to its network to eliminate the DNS request leakage that causes collisions, or mitigate the harmful impact.

One has to wonder if any trademark lawyers reading this will think: “Ooh, free defensive registration!” It will be interesting to see if any of them give it a cheeky shot.
I’ve got a feeling that most new gTLD applicants will want to take ICANN up on its offer. It’s not an ideal solution for them, but it does give them a way to get into the root relatively quickly.
There’s no telling what ICANN’s additional studies will find, but there’s a chance it could be negative for their string(s) — getting delegated at least mitigates the risk of never getting delegated.
The new ICANN proposal may in some cases interfere with their plans to market and use their TLDs, however.
Take a dot-brand such as .cisco, which the networking company has applied for. Its block list is likely to have about 100,000 strings on it, increasing the chances that useful, brandable SLDs are going to be taken out of circulation for a while.
ICANN is also proposing to conduct an awareness-raising campaign, using the media, to let network operators know about the risks that new gTLDs may present to their networks.
Depending on how effective this is, new registries may be able to forget about getting positive column inches for their launch — if a journalist is handed a negative angle for a story on a plate, they’ll take it.

First-come, first-served sunrise periods on the cards

New gTLD registries will be able to offer first-come, first-served sunrise periods under a shake-up of the program’s rights protection mechanisms announced a week ago.
The new Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements (pdf) contains a number of concessions to registries that may make gTLD launches easier but worry some trademark owners.
But it also contains a concession, I believe unprecedented, to the Intellectual Property Constituency that appears to give it a special veto over launch programs in geographic gTLDs.
Sunrise Periods
Under the old rules, which came about following the controversial “strawman” meetings late last year, new gTLD registries would have to give a 30-day notice period before launching their sunrise periods.
That was to give trademark owners enough time to consider their defensive registration strategies and to register their marks in the Trademark Clearinghouse.
The new rules give registries more flexibility. The 30-day notice requirement is still there, but only for registries that decide to offer a “Start Date” sunrise period as opposed to an “End Date” sunrise.
These are new concepts that require a bit of explanation.
An End Date sunrise is the kind of sunrise we’re already familiar with — the registry collects applications for domains from trademark owners but doesn’t actually allocate them until the end of the period. This may involve an auction when there are multiple applications for the same string.
A Start Date sunrise is a relative rarity — where registrations are actually processed and domains allocated while the sunrise period is still running. First-come, first-served, in other words.
This gives more flexibility to registries in their launch plans. They’ll be able to showcase mark-owning anchor tenants during sunrise, for example.
But it gives less certainty to trademark owners, which in many cases won’t be able to guarantee they’ll get the domain matching their mark no matter how wealthy they are.
Under the new ICANN rules, only registries operating a Start Date Sunrise need to give the 30 days notice. These sunrise periods have to run for a minimum of 30 days.
It seems that registries running End Date Sunrises will be able to give notice the same day they start accepting sunrise applications, but will have to run their sunrise period for at least 60 days.
Launch Programs
There was some criticism of the old RPM rules for potentially limiting registries’ ability to run things such as “Founders Programs”, getting anchor tenants through the door early to help promote their gTLDs.
The old rules said that the registry could allocate up to 100 names to itself, making them essentially exempt from sunrise periods, for promotional purposes.
New gTLD applicants had proposed that this should be expanded to enable these 100 names to go to third parties (ie, “founders”) but ICANN has not yet given this the green light.
In the new rules, the 100 names still must be allocated to the registry itself, but ICANN said it might relax this requirement in future. In the legalese of the Registry Agreement, it said:

Subject to further review and analysis regarding feasibility, implementation and protection of intellectual property rights, if a process for permitting registry operators to Allocate or register some or all of such one hundred (100) domain names (plus their IDN variants, where applicable) (each a “Launch Name”) to third parties prior to or during the Sunrise Period for the purposes of promoting the TLD (a “Qualified Launch Program”) is approved by ICANN, ICANN will prepare an addendum to these TMCH Requirements providing for the implementation of such Qualified Launch Program, which will be automatically incorporated into these TMCH Requirements without any further action of ICANN or any registry operator.

ICANN will also allow registries to request the ability to offer launch programs that diverge from the TMCH RPM rules.
If the launch program requested was detailed in the new gTLD application itself, it would carry a presumption of being approved, unless ICANN “reasonably determines that such requested registration program could contribute to consumer confusion or the infringement of intellectual property rights.”
If the registry had not detailed the program in its application, but ICANN had approved a similar program for another similar registry, there’d be the same presumption of approval.
Together, these provisions seems to give registries a great deal of flexibility in designing launch programs whilst making ICANN the guardian of intellectual property rights.
Geo gTLDs
For officially designated “geographic” gTLDs, it’s a bit more complicated.
Some geographic gTLD applicants had worried about their ability to reserve names for the governments backing their applications before the trademark owners wade in.
How can the .london registry make sure that the Metropolitan Police obtains police.london before the Sting-fronted pop group (or more likely its publisher) snaps up the name at sunrise, for example?
The new rules again punt a firm decision, instead giving the Intellectual Property Constituency, with ICANN oversight, the ability to come up with a list of names or categories of names that geographic registries will be allowed to reserve from their sunrise periods.
It’s very unusual — I can’t think of another example of this happening — for ICANN to hand decision-making power like this to a single constituency of the Generic Names Supporting Organization.
When GNSO Councillors also questioned the move, ICANN VP of DNS industry engagement Cyrus Namazi wrote:

In response to community input, the TMCH Requirements were revised to allow registry operators the ability to submit applications to conduct launch programs. In response to the large number of Geo TLDs who voiced similar concerns, the IPC publicly stated that it would be willing to work with Geo TLDs to develop mutually acceptable language for Geo TLD launch programs. We viewed this proposal as a way for community members to work collectively to propose to ICANN a possible solution for an issue specifically affecting intellectual property rights-holders and Geo TLDs. Any such proposal will be subject to ICANN’s review and ICANN has expressly stated that any such proposal may be subject to public comment in which other interested community members may participate.

While ICANN is calling the RPM rules “final”, it seems that in reality there’s still a lot of work to be done before new gTLD registries, geo or otherwise, will have a clear picture of what they can and cannot offer at launch.