Go Daddy cozies up new gTLD players, drops its own .home and .casa bids

Go Daddy has changed tack in its new gTLD strategy, dropping its own applications and positioning itself strongly as a registry-neutral channel to market.
The company spent yesterday wooing new gTLD applicants at a specially convened meeting in its native Arizona; there were representatives from about half of the applied-for gTLDs in attendance.
But apart from the fact that Go Daddy has withdrawn its applications for .home and .casa — and symbolically dropped the “.com” from its logo — the company is playing its strategy pretty close to its chest.
Director of policy planning James Bladel told DI that the meeting was more about “starting a conversation” with registries, rather than laying out Go Daddy’s specific plans for new gTLDs.
The company will be a hugely important channel to market for many gTLDs, and competition for store-front space on the Go Daddy home page is expected to be fierce.
Existing big-volume “new” TLDs, such as .info and .co, can attribute much of their success to Go Daddy.
It’s responsible for well over half of all .info domains registered today and .CO Internet’s success to date can no doubt be attributed in no small part to its strong relationship with the company.
But Bladel would not be drawn on Go Daddy’s specific plans for the next wave of gTLDs.
While the company has a patent on a method of allocating shelf space via an Adsense-style bidding technology, Bladel said Go Daddy has not yet decided whether to use that system.
The company could also use other methods, algorithmic rather than commercial, for selecting which TLDs to display to users, such as geographic location, he said.
Another conversation that needs to happen relates to launch timing.
Ideas may include staggering launches to benefit from joint marketing efforts, or pooling launches into big-draw “launch day” events, Bladel speculated, noting that the company is more interested in hearing ideas from gTLD applicants right now.
While Go Daddy will continue to push its application for .godaddy dot-brand, with the loss of .home and .casa it will no longer be in the mass-market gTLD registry game.
Registry-neutral registrars may actually be a rarity in the new gTLD era.
eNom will certainly walk away with interests in more than a few gTLDs, directly and via its deal with Donuts. Tucows, Web.com and Directi will also have some, depending on contention set results.
Apart from Go Daddy, the only other top-ten registrars without their own gTLDs could be United and FastDomains.

Told you so? Four new gTLDs given geographic surprise, others given a pass

Four new gTLD applications have been told by ICANN the strings they wanted are geographic and will require government backing if they want to be approved.
One of the affected applicants is Tata, the $100bn Indian conglomerate.
During a webinar this week, ICANN reported the results of its new gTLD program’s Geographic Names Panel, which decides whether applicants need the support of governments or not.
Six applicants that had designated their applied-for string as geographic were ruled to be actually non-geographic. Three applicants that said they weren’t geographic were ruled to be, in fact, geographic.
And four strings DI had previously said were likely to be ruled geographic, actually received a pass.
These are the applications that have been told they’re geographic:

• .bar — This was applied for by two applicants (one of which was a Demand Media subsidiary) as a TLD for drinking establishments. But “Bar” is also a commune of Montenegro, so it’s been deemed a geographic string by ICANN.
• .tata — This is a dot-brand applied for by Tata Group, the 150-year-old, $100bn-a-year Indian conglomerate. But “Tata” is also a province of Morocco.
• .tui — Applied for by TUI AG as a dot-brand, the string is also a province of Burkina Faso.

Geographic gTLDs can only be approved with the formal support or non-objection of the relevant governments.
All three of these strings were highlighted in the DI PRO database as potentially problematic geographic gTLDs over a year ago, well before the new gTLD application window closed.
I even reported for The Register in January 2012 that .tata was going to have problems.
According to ICANN’s Application Guidebook, any string that matches something on the various International Standards Organization’s lists of geographic names will be deemed geographic for new gTLD approval purposes.
But we got it wrong on some counts.
For example, we wondered whether the seven applications for .store were going to be ruled geographic, on the basis that Štore (note the accent) is a municipality of Slovenia.
Also, .delta, .est and .capital match regions of Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Denmark and all appear on the same protected ISO 3166 list as .tata, .tui and .bar, but do not appear to have been ruled geographic.
ICANN has not published the rationale behind its panel’s decisions yet.
A further six applied-for gTLD strings that had been designated geographic by their applicants were ruled to be not, in fact, geographic.
These all appear to be abbreviations of place names, or place names that do not appear on protected lists: .frl, .ist, .ryukyu, .scot, .vegas and .zulu.
There’s no real harm to applicants that find themselves in this position.

PICs could be Beijing deal-breaker for new gTLDs

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee may delay the approval of new gTLDs if applicants don’t submit Public Interest Commitments tomorrow.
That’s the message coming out of ICANN today, on the eve of the deadline for PICs submission set less than one month ago.
PICs, you will recall, are binding, enforceable commitments that new gTLD applicants are able to voluntarily add to their registry contracts with ICANN.
They’re meant to satisfy the GAC’s request for ICANN to tighten its grip on new gTLD registries and to give applicants a way to avoid GAC Advice and formal objections against their bids.
Applicants that commit to do whatever was asked of them in GAC Early Warnings, for example, may be able to avoid having the warning mutate into a full-blown GAC Advice kiss of death.
When ICANN announced the PICs idea a month ago, it gave applicants until March 5 to submit them. It intends to publish them on Wednesday for public comment and the GAC’s perusal.
But applicants are understandably nervous (to put it mildly) to comply, given that PICs would be enforceable via a dispute process that has yet to be written but could put their contracts at risk.
Responding to these concerns during a conference call today, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade urged applicants to hit the deadline or risk the GAC delaying its Advice discussions beyond Beijing.
“I don’t think we can delay the submission of the PICs,” Chehade said. “If we do, then we will definitely not have the GAC come back to use with their committed advice in Beijing.”
“Unless we want to get them to do this advice beyond Beijing, we should stick with the 30 days or so we’ve asked people to get this done and make it happen,” he said.
The Beijing meeting runs April 7 to 11. The GAC is expected to issue its advice shortly after the meeting ends.
ICANN reckons it will be able to start approving new gTLDs April 23, but has also stated on numerous occasions that it will not approve anything before the GAC has spoken.
Chehade said today, based on his conversations with influential GAC members, that pushing the PICs deadline out beyond March 5 by even a few days would seriously endanger the current GAC Advice timeline.
New gTLD applicants are now in the tricky position of having to decide between potentially costly delays today and an unknown dispute system that could prove dangerous in future.

ICANN to publish unfinished RAA tomorrow

ICANN will tomorrow publish for public comment a version of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement that accredited registrars have not yet agreed to.
CEO Fadi Chehade told a conference call of registries and new gTLD applicants as much this afternoon, causing the Registrars Stakeholder Group to immediately state that talks have not finished yet.
However, ICANN subsequently confirmed the plan to DI, clarifying that the documents it will publish tomorrow will highlight ongoing points of divergence between ICANN and the RrSG.
The posting will comprise documents with “competing text identified that shows the similarities and differences in position between ICANN and the Registrar [Negotiating Team”, ICANN said.
I believe that the publication has been set for tomorrow to allow ICANN to hit its public comment deadlines for the big Beijing public meeting next month.
The posting was apparently agreed to at a meeting between the registrars and ICANN on Friday.
While the two sides have come to agreement on most of the changes to the RAA, sticking points remain despite now-daily talks.
I understand that a proposed unilateral right of amendment in ICANN’s favor is currently a big barrier to final agreement.

Nutty DotConnectAfrica gives DI a good kicking

New gTLD applicant DotConnectAfrica is not happy with DI, again.
The nutty .africa applicant took issue with a recent post describing the company as “nutty” and trying to make sense of a rambling conspiracy-laden letter it had sent to the US Congress.
As a reminder, DCA is competing with South Africa’s ccTLD registry operator UniForum, which has the support of African governments and the African Union, for the .africa gTLD.
DCA has been in denial about the fact that its application is doomed for many months, scrabbling for any opportunity to cling to its .africa dream, and DI is its latest windmill.
DCA requested that I publish its lengthy “rejoinder” to our last blog post here, so I have, albeit interspersed with my own commentary.
I apologize in advance for leaving DCA’s formatting intact.

Dear Mr. Kevin Murphy,
Subject: Our Rejoinder to your article on DCA’s Complaint to U.S. Congress
The attention of DotConnectAfrica (DCA) Trust has been drawn to your recent Blog article with the title: ‘Nutty DCA Complains to US Congress about .Africa’ (http://domainincite.com/11958-nutty-dca-complains-to-us-congress-about-africa).
Even though you have continued to demonstrate your penchant for biased and negative reporting against DCA Trust, we think that the use of the pejorative ‘nutty’ is uncalled for and shows your disrespect and disdain for our organization and we believe you owe us an apology.

I don’t believe an apology is required.
DCA is the laughing stock of the industry, a status it will continue to hold until its .africa bid is killed off a few weeks from now.
“Nutty” is a generous, whimsical way to describe the company’s recent antics, which have included:

• nuttily wasting >$185,000 on a gTLD application that has no chance of being approved,
• nuttily applying for the wrong gTLD (.dotafrica),
• using fake online identities to make it appear that DCA has grass-roots support for its nutty ideas,
• throwing around nutty allegations of “wholesale illegality” without a) specifying what laws have been broken b) by whom and c) presenting any credible evidence to back up the allegations,
• overabundant use of bold text, underlined text, colored text and font changes to distract from the fact that its nutty missives lack substance — a tactic favored by online conspiracy theorists since the dawn of the ‘net.

In short, if you think “nutty” is bad, trust me when I say it was the least antagonistic adjective I could come up with.

However, even though we already feel a sense of righteous indignation by your mocking tone and the fact that you have openly engaged in unnecessary name-calling simply to aggravate DCA Trust; we are actually more interested in setting the records straight for the benefit of your readers, and wish only to focus on the substantive issues in this rejoinder.
You cannot write to deliberately misrepresent the facts contained in our letter to the 113th United States Congress. For example, you have stated that “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.”
Wrong – Not DCA’s View to say Uniforum is Only qualified candidate
First, this is not our view, therefore you cannot put words into our mouth, and we do not agree that UniForum was the only qualified candidate to run .Africa. This is not the viewpoint conveyed in our letter to the United States Congress. We only attempted to re-state what is contained in a draft unpublished report on the ‘unofficial history’ of DotAfrica that was written by Ms. Rebecca Wanjiku, a Kenyan journalist and member of the DotAfrica Registry Project Team under the contrived ‘Africainonespace’ structure (http://www.africainonespace.org/); who had purportedly interviewed Mr. Vika Mpisane, then Chairperson of the AfTLD.

My blog post, as DCA accurately quotes, said “according to information in Bekele’s letter”. The “information in Bekele’s letter” is the text she quoted from Wanjiku’s “draft unpublished report”.
I would have cited the report itself but, as DCA says, it’s unpublished.
In a nutshell, Wanjiku reported that the AU endorsed UniForum because it “wanted African ccTLDs to play a crucial role in implementing .Africa” and that UniForum was the only African ccTLD with an EPP registry.

This interview revealed to us that no tender process actually took place, because the name of UniForum was simply put forward by the AfTLD, and this was accepted by the African Union Commission (AUC). This peculiar transaction as recorded in Rebecca Wanjiku’s account apparently contradicts the official AUC position that there was an open and transparent tender process which “attracted both local and international registries interested in managing dotAfrica gTLD.”

Only a nutty reading of the Wanjiku extract suggests that “no tender process actually took place”.
The existence of the African Union’s November 2011 .africa RFP is not open to question. It’s a matter of public record.
You can still download it here.
DCA is on record acknowledging the RFP at the time it was published, ranting: “DCA has decided not to participate in this sham RFP process and also urges prospective bidders to also avoid the RFP.”
And now DCA is openly questioning whether the tender process even happened? Nutty, nutty, nutty.

Therefore, our contention is that UniForum ZA Central Registry, the other competing applicant for .Africa gTLD is the beneficiary of wholesale illegality in the process of winning the endorsement of the African Union (AU) Commission for the .Africa geographic Top-Level Domain name. This is clearly spelt out in our letter to the U.S. Congress and it does not need any further elaboration or an extra-ordinary effort on the part of any educated person to read it several times to understand what DCA Trust is saying.

Everything DCA produces reads like it was written by Google Translate, run through an overenthusiastic thesaurus, then published by a computer science undergraduate in 1995. In my opinion.
I finished reading its letter to Congress wondering: who did the illegal stuff? What was the illegal stuff they did? What laws were broken? Where? When? Is it worth my time even asking?
Given that DCA wants Congressional intervention, one would expect it to state what the alleged illegal acts were, but it doesn’t. It just says “wholesale illegality” and leaves it at that.
It’s my view that the real reason DCA is pissed off is that, having failed to win the support of African ccTLDs, the AU’s 2011 RFP pretty much excluded DCA from getting the AU’s endorsement.
The company lacked the expertise, experience and the support of African ccTLD operators that the RFP specifically asked for and weighted in its scoring criteria.
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in African procurement law, but I’d guess that the AU would be unlikely to publish such criteria in an open RFP document if such criteria were illegal.
That’s why, in my view, DCA throws around terms like “wholesale illegality” without getting into specifics. As soon as one look at specifics, its argument melts away like warm Nutella.
It may have been unfair, from DCA’s perspective, for the AU to require a competent partner for .africa, but if the alternative was a company that would do something nutty like, I dunno, apply for the wrong string…

Deliberately Obfuscating to confuse your readers
After reading your report, we believe that you have deliberately tried to obfuscate the matter to either confuse your readers or intentionally divert the attention of the global public from understanding the full import and main implications of our letter to the U.S. Congress. You cannot report that “the AU Commission, at the conclusion of its tender process, decided to support the UniForum proposal” when the available evidence profoundly suggests otherwise; that indeed, there was really no tender process. We have always challenged the AU Commission to publish the report of that Tender Process for the entire world to see. We also maintained this in our official response to the ICANN GAC Early Warning that was issued against our .Africa application.

DI has nothing to gain from obfuscating facts or confusing readers. The entire raison d’etre of the site is to do exactly the opposite.
The best way to avoid confusing readers would be to simply no longer report on DCA’s nutty pronouncements. Believe me, nothing would give me greater pleasure.

Only ICANN can determine a qualified candidate to operate .africa
Second, our fixed position is that only the ICANN can determine the “qualified candidate” to operate .Africa based on the outcome of the new gTLD program. This is not for the AfTLD or the AU to decide contrary to the dictates of the new gTLD program and the sacrosanct stipulations contained in the new gTLD Applicant’s Guidebook. By attempting to decide, as a fait accompli, the registry operator for the new .Africa gTLD, the AU acted ultra vires, and this is a clear usurpation, and an inexcusable violation, of ICANN’s roles, responsibilities, privileges and authority under the officially sanctioned new gTLD program. This is a viewpoint that we have already communicated officially to ICANN and also in our public comments posted against the .Africa new gTLD application submitted by UniForum ZA Central Registry.

Has DCA read the Guidebook?
ICANN makes it abundantly clear throughout that it will defer to governments on geographic gTLDs.
It won’t approve any geographic gTLDs that don’t have the support of the relevant government. For regions such as Africa, that support has to come from 60% of the region’s governments.
DCA presumably knows all this, and yet it nuttily applied for .africa (.dotafrica) without that government support, dooming its $185,000 application to certain failure.
UniForum, on the other hand, does have that governmental support, giving it a shot at being approved.
Does DCA honestly believe that ICANN’s board of directors will favor DCA over UniForum, ignoring the wishes of the governments of Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, D.R.Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moroco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the African Union itself?
Good luck with that.
Even if all of Uniforum’s support were to evaporate tomorrow, DCA’s application would still be rejected under ICANN’s “sacrosanct” rules, because DCA doesn’t have government support and is unlikely to get it having spent the last year randomly accusing all those concerned of corruption and law-breaking.

Third, we have always maintained that if UniForum had been endorsed to apply on behalf of the African Community, then it should have submitted an application on behalf of the African Community and acknowledged the same community in its .Africa new gTLD bid to ICANN. We believe that UniForum, after using the African Community as ‘an excuse’ to obtain an important endorsement from the AUC, deliberately failed to acknowledge the same African Community in its bid based on the answers that it provided (or failed to provide by indicating ‘blank’) to ICANN Evaluation Question Nos. 19 and 20 in its .Africa new gTLD application. In DCA’s estimation, this is deceitful and fraudulent. If you obtain an endorsement under the pretext that you intend to, or have agreed to run and operate a geographic TLD on behalf of the African Community, then you should actually apply on behalf of this named community, to wit, the African Community.
UNIFORUM Application is Not on behalf of African Community
For further emphasis, it is necessary for one to refer to the published parts of UniForum’s application and their answers to Evaluation Question Numbers 19 and 20 to indeed verify that UniForum deliberately failed to acknowledge any Community in their official answers to ICANN. In their answer to Question No. 19 (“Is the application for a Community based TLD?”), they unequivocally stated “No”. The question No. 20 (a) – (e) which immediately follows: “(a) Provide the name and full description of the community that the applicant is committing serve”; UniForum intentionally left it blank, thus indicating that they have not actually named any community that they claim to be committing to serve in their new gTLD application for .Africa.
Your redefinition of “Community” against the rule book specifications to support UNIORUM is frivolous and mischievous
Therefore, your attempt to define ‘Big-C’ and ‘small-c’ is quite irrelevant and an unnecessary exercise in frivolity at a time that analytical and professional seriousness are called for. The AU Communiqué published in March 2012 clearly states that “the AU Commission selected UniForum SA (the ZA Central Registry Operator or ZACR), to administer and operate dotAfrica gTLD on behalf of the African community”; which you also previously acknowledged in your report of July 2012. As a matter of fact, we are actually compelled to believe that your statement that “no applicant was obliged to submit a big-C Community application under ICANN’s rules” is not only flippant but also quite mischievous.

Does DCA really not understand the difference between a “community” and a “Community gTLD application”?
I’ve attempted to explain it before and I’m not sure how to better phrase it than this: one’s a type of gTLD application and the other isn’t.
I suspect DCA does “get it” because its own application for .africa (.dotafrica) states:
DCA believes that DotAfrica does not qualify as a community-based application for two main reasons:
a) There is no clearly delineated, organized and pre-existing community that is targeted by the DotAfrica gTLD.
b) It is difficult to clearly identify who are the ‘members’ of the community, since a ‘community-definition’ of DotAfrica will restrict its use and functionality. Since ‘DotAfrica’ does not necessarily mean a TLD for ‘Africans’, it is difficult to determine the persons or entities that are considered to form the community, and the number of people or entities that make up the community.
In other words, while DCA believes .africa should not be a Community application under ICANN’s rules, it also believes that UniForum had an obligation to submit a Community application anyway? Nutty.

The actual bone of contention is that an endorsement was sought and obtained under the pretext that a Community TLD application would be submitted on behalf of the African Community. The basis cannot change after one has obtained the endorsement. DCA Trust believes that it is not your responsibility to explain why UniForum willfully reneged on the commitment that was implicit in the endorsement that it had received from the African Union Commission.

Nowhere in the African Union’s RFP for .africa does it say that the applicant must submit a Community application.
I’m not aware of any statements from UniForum to the effect that it would submit a Community application.
DCA has never provided any evidence that the AU wanted a Community application nor that UniForum promised one.
Its only tenuous scrap of evidence appears to be a press release (pdf) from the AU that announces UniForum was selected to “operate dotAfrica gTLD on behalf of the African community.”
To read that sentence as “UniForum will submit a Community application” is quite, quite nutty.
Incidentally, if UniForum did lie to the AU and other governments about submitting a Community application, it’s within the governments’ power to withdraw their endorsements at any time.

Uniforum’s Endorsement should be legally invalidated
Our position is that if UniForum has reneged in its commitment, that this fundamental issue must be forced so as to hold it accountable in order to prevent the perpetration of any acts of illegality and outright fraud over the issue of .Africa; and if this is process of accountability is not established by the African Internet Community, the African Union (and its African government member states) or ICANN, then the matter should be rightfully escalated for adjudication to the powerful United States Congress as the highest over-sighting institution of the United States Federal Government. We contend that if UniForum has been fraudulent in its application, this should legally invalidate the endorsement that it has received from the African Union Commission. This determination must be made officially by some authoritative body in order for the cause of justice to be served.
United States Congress has complete jurisdiction over the entire new gTLD program by ICANN
Our understanding is that the .Africa new gTLD is an Internet resource to be delegated by ICANN, and the same ICANN is under U.S. Federal Government Oversight by virtue of its mandate as a federal contractor handling the Internet Technical Management Functions (such as domain names and unique Internet address numbering and assignment) under the IANA Contract. It is therefore our contention that the United States Congress has complete jurisdiction over the entire new gTLD program of ICANN and this cannot be challenged (or scoffed at) by anybody without drawing the ire of Congress. DCA Trust has therefore acted correctly by recognizing the overarching authority of Congress over the entire ICANN new gTLD process and deciding on its own to undertake a necessary due process escalation of this matter to Congress. It is really not our fault if Mr. Kevin Murphy as the Domainincite Blogger lacks the intellectual acuity and analytical acumen to see this matter the same way we see it.
A Dishonest Analysis: Not even ICANN will agree with your opinion – Coomunity applications are not just “a technicality.”.
Furthermore, your explanation that “there’s no need to take advantage of the mechanism if you’re applying for a geographic string and have the necessary government support” is patently dishonest. DCA’s demand for accountability is actually pivoted on this particular point: how the government support was obtained, because the ‘community’ pretext was used by UniForum to obtain the government support from the AUC. Therefore, we believe that it is not your position to justify anything or create new definitions of what ‘community’ is about. Not even ICANN will agree with your opinion that “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.”
Community applications are not just “a technicality”. If UniForum claims to have both community support from the African Internet Community, and the support of African Governments, and has been selected to administer and operate a geographic TLD for the benefit of the African Community (whichever way this community is defined), then why did it not acknowledge this ‘African Community’ in its application? What is UniForum afraid of? We believe that if there is a proper accountability mechanism, then the truth regarding the actual intentions of UniForum can be fully established.
DCA cannot help with your Confusion, but we do not expect Congress NOT to be confused
Again, you have attempted to obfuscate the issues by stating in your Blog that DCA seems to deliberately confuse the process AfTLD used to back UniForum and the process the AU Commission used to select UniForum. We cannot help your confusion, since if you are confused you cannot assist your readers to properly dissect and understand what the pertinent issues are.
We do not expect Congress to be confused. Our understanding is that the process which the AfTLD used to back UniForum clearly caused the ‘No Tender Process’ that was used by the AU to select UNiForum.
For us, there is no confusion since the one connected chain remains evident for anyone to see. Our letter to Congress clearly alludes to the “illegal subversion of what was supposed to be an open and competitive tender process.”
The UNIFORUm Proposal is the same as the failed ARC, which you refereed as ‘Cuckoo Business Model’
We may recall that the African Registry Consortium (ARC) that was formed by the directors of UniForum SA sometime in 2011 had tried to solicit an expression of interest from the AfTLD: “For the provision of a domain name registry solution to the African Top Level Domain Organization (aftld) for purposes of preparing, submitting, funding and promoting a successful bid to ICANN for the dotafrica new gTLD.” (See http://africanregistry.net/index.php#endorse).
The ARC proposal had failed after DCA Trust campaigned vigorously against it as a potential Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) scam and for its ‘carpetbag opportunism’. It is the same proposal of the ARC that was pushed in the name of UniForum, and as you have also acknowledged in your write-up, “the AfTLD bid morphed into the UniForum bid.” The connection is therefore quite unmistakable, and we are not fooled. DCA Trust has always warned the African Union Commission and UniForum ZA Central Registry to beware of any irregularities over .Africa new gTLD and our position has not shifted. We are fully convinced that illegality has occurred and that an accountability mechanism must be established by the United States Congress to look into this.
Your deviation from the Truth, Professionalism and Journalistic integrity
Those who have been following the Domainincite Blog (http://www.domainincite.com) may also recall that Kevin Murphy had written about the ‘Cuckoo Business Model’ which he now thinks does not (or should not) apply in the case of UniForum.

The “Cuckoo Business Model” I once discussed referred to the practice of applying for a new gTLD that you know another company is also going to apply for, not in order to actually operate it but rather to extort money from other applicants in your contention set before withdrawing.
It obviously doesn’t apply to .africa — UniForum has no intention of dropping its application and actually wants to run the .africa registry,
DCA, on the other hand, has no chance whatsoever of getting its .africa bid approved and its best-case-scenario outcome here is getting a pay-off from UniForum.
If anything, DCA would be the cuckoo.
It sucks for DCA, which was pimping the .africa brand long before UniForum, but that’s the risk it took when it broadcast its plans to the world before it knew what the rules were going to be.

Therefore, it is our opinion that you have already deviated from the path of truth, professionalism and journalistic integrity; and by engaging in unbalanced and biased reporting against DCA Trust, you have also become quite neglectful of your scared responsibilities to the global public.

As much as I hate to make ad hominem arguments, I can’t help but point out that this is coming from the company that has been creating unconvincing fake online identities to support its nutty positioning.
Truth ain’t DCA’s strong point.

Downplaying DCA’s request for US congress intervention in serious issues
Finally, we believe that you have been rather disingenuous in your attempts to down-play the reason for DCA’s request for the intervention of the U.S. Congress. We have recommended and clearly stated in our letter that Congress should:

• appoint a new gTLD Ombudsman that would report directly to Congress
• should 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.
• the new gTLD Ombudsman will be authorized by Congress with the powers of an Independent Counsel to investigate and adjudicate on issues of illegality that have been reported regarding new gTLD matters.

This is what we are asking Congress to do, and you cannot downplay the precedence-setting significance of this recommendation by stating whimsically that ICANN already has an Ombudsman. ICANN’s Ombudsman has no mandate to investigate alleged irregularities and acts of illegality that have been committed by new gTLD applicants.

Fair point.
Asking Congress for an independent Ombudsman was quite interesting, no matter how self-serving and unjustified the request, and perhaps I should have reported the idea in a little more detail.

We hope that you will publish this rejoinder in your Blog and give it proper visibility to ensure that your readers also have the opportunity to read our response to your article.

Sure thing.

We thank you in anticipation of your cooperation.
Yours sincerely,
DCA Public Communications Team
Nairobi, Kenya

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.