Sixteen new gTLD bids could face the firing squad

ICANN’s board of directors has an unusually bumper crop of non-trivial resolutions on its agenda for next week, including the fate of the .ly TLD, new anti-harassment rules, and killing off as many as 16 applications from the 2012 new gTLD application round.

Of the nine items on the agenda, published overnight, four stand out as noteworthy:

Termination Procedure for Remaining 2012 Round Applications that were not Successful

With ICANN spooling up to start accepting new gTLD applications in the second quarter next year, it appears to be ready to clear the decks of the last application round by killing off lingering applications.

While details of the proposed procedure are not yet available, it could apply to as many as 15 applications that are currently marked as “Will Not Proceed” or other failure states in ICANN’s application database.

Perhaps the most obviously affected application is Nameshop’s bid for .idn, which was rejected because the string matches a protected country-code for Indonesia. ICANN has been begging Nameshop to withdraw its application for many years, but the requests have fallen on deaf ears.

If ICANN’s search engine is to be believed, major companies such as Tata (.tata, blocked on geographic grounds) and L’Oréal (.salon, lost at last-resort auction to Identity Digital) still have failed, unwithdrawn applications.

Applications for contested, legally challenged, as-yet-undelegated gTLDs, including .web and .hotel, are also apparently still live in the system.

Transfer of the .LY (Libya) top-level domain to the General Authority of Communications and Informatics

Libya’s .ly ccTLD is notable because it’s somewhat popular as a domain hack for words that end in “ly”. It’s been delegated to Libyan state-owned General Post and Telecommunication Company for 20 years.

While the transition from GPTC to GACI, the government regulator, may just be a formality, there’s an added wrinkle that Libya, tormented by civil unrest since the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, currently has two governments and GACI is reportedly aligned with just one of them.

Community Anti-Harassment Policy and Retirement of Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment

ICANN has been sitting on this one for longer than expected. The Org proposed revisions to its Community Anti-Harassment Policy a year ago and quickly putting them to public comment, but there’s been scant movement on the issue since January.

The proposed changes would further regulate personal and professional interactions between ICANN community members.

Some commenters complained that the changes do not go far enough, suggesting that situations where no offence was intended and none was taken should also be disciplinary infractions.

Others said that the changes would have a chilling effect and fail to sufficiently take into account cultural differences among ICANN’s global community.

The proposals came shortly after the latest in a series of sexual harassment lawsuits against the Org was revealed. That suit was settled after ICANN failed to get it thrown out of court.

Some relevant developments over the last eight months include the appointment of a new Ombuds and CEO, allegations (denied by ICANN) that it retaliated against friends of the latest harassment plaintiff by firing them, and ICANN’s capitulation to the Trump administration by easing itself away from public commitments to diversity, inclusion and equity.

.ai rival lines up gTLD bid

The increasingly popular .ai top-level domain looks like it could have its first full competitor before long.

An organization called 0G Foundation, which says it has made a “decentralized AI operating system”, has announced plans to apply to ICANN for the new gTLD .agi next year.

AGI stands for “artificial general intelligence”, considered by many to be the end goal of AI technology development, where software possesses intelligence equivalent to or better than a human.

0G made the announcement via Unstoppable Domains, its application partner.

The organization plans to make .agi names available on its own proprietary blockchain first, with a “limited-time pre-sale” before launch “in the coming months”.

Unstoppable is selling .agi “reservations”, with prices starting at $5 for gibberish and potentially valuable dictionary words carrying premium price tags.

Sixteen more orgs vie for cheap gTLDs, but…

Africa and Latin America are still under-represented in applications for ICANN’s new gTLD Applicant Support Program, according to the latest stats.

The program now has a whopping 76 organizations at some stage of the application process, which is 31 more than ICANN originally budgeted for. That’s up from 60 a month ago.

The program offers successful applicants a discount of 75% to 85% off the expected $227,000 application fee, among other perks such as access to pro bono service providers.

But the geographic breakdown shows that, as of the August 19 compilation date, only one more applicant hails from Africa and there’s only one more from Latin America and the Caribbean, compared to a month earlier.

Two influential ICANN advisory committees, including the governments, told ICANN earlier this month that they are “deeply concerned” that the ASP doesn’t seem to be reaching potential applicants in these two regions.

Hardly any applications have actually been submitted to be formally evaluated yet. There are 37 open applications that have yet to even submit the names of their organizations. Another 36 have done so, but not yet completed the application form.

I wonder if the top-line count may include a certain number of tire-kickers. The barriers to starting an application are pretty low, requiring just an account on the ICANN web site and a one-time password app on your phone.

Only three applications so far have been conditionally approved — one from Europe and two from Asia-Pacific — and three others from Asia-Pac have submitted their applications for review.

Of the 37 that have opened an application, the geographic region of 19 is still not known, so it’s possible the regional mix could change a lot as applications are actually submitted.

The program is open to charities and other non-profits, with participation from commercial entities limited to small businesses based in poorer regions.

Cloud gTLD gets launch dates

Another long-dormant gTLD from the 2012 round is set to launch soon.

Documents filed with ICANN show that the Chinese software company Qihoo 360 is set to launch .yun, the Pinyin transliteration of the Chinese word and Mandarin character meaning “cloud”.

The ICANN web site states that .yun will enter a one-month sunrise period September 24, with general availability likely coming around October 28.

Qihoo stated in its 2012 application that the domain would be marketed via its existing cloud storage services.

The company also is contacted to run .xihuan (“like”), .anquan (“security”) and .shouji (“cellphone”), but it hasn’t launched any of them yet.

Qihoo has been sanctioned by the US government for the last five years due to its alleged links to the Chinese military.

Governments say new gTLD program “credibility” at stake

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is “deeply concerned” about the credibility of the new gTLD program’s Next Round, after a scheme to broaden the geographic spread of applicants has started to look like a failure.

The GAC and ALAC are calling for ICANN to address urgently what is seen as flaws in its Applicant Support Program, which offers deep discounts on application fees to small businesses in non-developed countries and to non-profit applicants.

GAC chair Nicolas Caballero and ALAC chair Jonathan Zuck said governments are “deeply concerned about the program’s current trajectory, particularly given the limited time remaining in the application window and the disproportionately low representation from underserved regions”.

ICANN said last week that it has approved the first three ASP applicants. One applicant is from Europe and two are from the Asia-Pacific region.

The latest monthly stats, dated July 23, show that only five applications were classified as “Submitted & in Review”, while 25 were “Initiated” and 26 were “In Draft”. By geography, 10 potential applications come from Africa, 16 from Asia-Pacific, four from Europe, 19 from North America and just two from Latin America.

Caballero and Zuck wrote (pdf):

we also identified a geographic imbalance from ICANN’s data… despite seven months of outreach, potential applications from North America (33%) vastly outnumber those from the LAC region (3%), raising questions about the inclusivity of the program.

…

we really think that the ASP is not merely a procedural requirement but a cornerstone of the Next Round’s credibility. At minimum, failure to address its structural challenges risks perpetuating the dominance of well-resourced entities, undermining ICANN’s multistakeholder principles. We kindly request the Board to treat this matter with the urgency it demands

They want ICANN to conduct a fast review of why the geographic balance is tilted towards North America at the expense of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

As I’ve previously noted, the North America region by ICANN’s definition is small. It doesn’t even include Mexico. Small businesses from the USA and Canada don’t qualify for the ASP and the only other places in the region are US island territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam.

The GAC and ALAC want to know whether the low uptake elsewhere is due to ICANN’s lack of local outreach, complexities in the application process, or costs. Why are draft applications not being submitted?

With the clock ticking down to the November 19 closure of the application window, The August 15 letter calls for ICANN to figure out what’s going wrong and let it know by August 22 — this coming Friday.

Even if it wasn’t August, and we weren’t talking about ICANN, that’s a pretty tight deadline.

NIXI planning doomed new gTLD bids

Indian national ccTLD registry NIXI is reportedly planning to branch out into new gTLDs, unfortunately it’s picked two strings that are strictly banned under ICANN rules.

According to an Economic Times interview with CEO Devesh Tyagi today, NIXI has eyes on applications for .india and .bharat in next year’s application round. “Bharat” is the Latin transliteration of the Hindi endonym for India.

Unfortunately for NIXI, applications for both strings would be doomed to failure under ICANN rules, according to the current draft of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook.

The AGB says: “Applications for strings that are country or territory names will not be approved”.

Such names are defined as, among other things: “It is a short-form name listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard, or a translation of the short-form name in any language.”

Both “india” and “bharat” fall into those categories. India is in the ISO 3166-1 standard and Bharat is its translation.

There are no carve-outs or exceptions for national ccTLD registries, even with local governmental approval. The prohibition is based on government advice and pretty much welded into the AGB at this point.

Should NIXI apply for these strings regardless, it would be able to request a partial refund but would still potentially lose tens of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable expenses.

NIXI already runs .भारत (.bharat in the Devanagari script used in Hindi), but that was applied for and won under ICANN’s entirely separate IDN ccTLD Fast Track program, which allows ccTLD operators to apply for internationalized domain name versions of their existing ccTLDs.

Three applicants qualify for cheapo gTLDs

Three organizations have been given ICANN’s approval to apply for new gTLDs next year at a deeply discounted rate.

All three are non-profit or nongovernmental organizations, ICANN said. Two come from the Asia-Pacific region and one comes from Europe.

The identities of the applicants have not and will not be disclosed — to publish their names would likely tip the applicants’ hands in terms of what strings they intend to apply for, inviting competition.

The Applicant Support Program offers non-profit entities worldwide or small businesses in non-developed nations a discount of 75% to 85% on the base $227,000 application fee, along with a selection of other benefits.

As of today, there are 45 active applications, ICANN said. Seven come from Africa, 14 from Asia-Pac, five from Europe, two from Latin America, and 12 from North America. Another five haven’t said where they’re based yet.

According to July 23 stats, only five applications — three of which presumably have now been approved — had been fully submitted and were in review.

In the 2012 round, there were only three ASP applications and only one, from the company that now runs .kids, was successful in obtaining the discount.

The window for ASP applications closes in November.

Blockchain crisis looming for new gTLD next round

New gTLD applicants could face more of a threat from blockchain-based alternative naming systems next year than perhaps they first thought.

ICANN is coming under pressure to give additional rights to the owners of top-level strings that act like TLDs on blockchains, potentially adding friction — and six figures of extra costs — to applications for matching strings.

In the recently closed public comment period on the current draft Applicant Guidebook, two blockchain naming firms focused on the risk posed from name collisions should a gTLD get delegated that matches a blockchain TLD.

More importantly, ICANN’s influential Security and Stability Advisory Committee expressed the same views.

Alexander Urbelis, general counsel and CISO of Ethereum Name Service, said in his comments that many operators of alt-TLDs will apply for their DNS matches in next year’s application round, adding:

ICANN should consider that a new gTLD, for which an identical string already exists in an alternative name space, should be considered a compromised asset, and that delegating such gTLDs may subject ICANN, and applicants, to substantial liability. In addition to the technical issues posed by name collision, such delegations could also result in consumer confusion, difficulties with resolving queries (particularly as access to alternative names is increasingly integrated into mainstream web browsers), security risks, and broken authentication systems

Shifting gears, Urbelis then goes on to espouse the exactly opposite view to what you might expect from an operator of a blockchain naming system:

We urge ICANN to ensure that operators of strings in alternative names spaces are not given preferential treatment in the upcoming new gTLD application round, either deliberately or inadvertently. Such operators should not be rewarded for choosing to operate outside of ICANN governance and policies, particularly when the results of such preferential treatment could be so devastating for the stability of the DNS, as well as consumer trust in the new gTLD program and the DNS itself.

However, he concludes that alt-TLDs should be considered during the application process, specifically when ICANN’s evaluators conduct the String Similarity Evaluation.

we note that the string similarity evaluation does not appear to account for strings that may exist in alternative name spaces that are not under ICANN governance. Given the proliferation of such strings and alternative name spaces in recent years, ICANN should not ignore their existence by considering string similarity within only the ICANN-governed DNS, particularly due to the technical issues outlined above in connection with name collision.

Currently, this evaluation stage only looks at similarity to existing TLDs, some strings blocked by policy, and other applied-for strings.

If Urbelis’ advice were taken on board, an application for .clown, for example, could find itself ruled similar to alt-TLD .down, which is on the Handshake naming system and available at some registrars.

ENS runs .eth as a blockchain TLD. While the company claims over 1.6 million names registered there, .eth can never make it to the consensus DNS because ETH is the protected three-letter code for Ethiopia and therefore blocked by a Guidebook policy that is pretty much locked-in.

Unstoppable Domains, which markets dozens of alt-TLDs, focused on name collisions in its brief comment to ICANN, seeking extra clarity in how the collision assessors will decide whether a string is “high risk”.

The current AGB says evaluators will look at both quantitative data — measurements of traffic for non-existent TLDs to the root servers for example — and unspecified “qualitative” factors. Unstoppable’s head of operations Michael Campagnolo wrote:

If ICANN wants to help applicants to assess their risk pre-application submission, examples and sources of qualitative evidence should be described and made available to applicants prior to, and in a reasonable amount of time before the opening of the application window, similar to the quantitative information.

The subtext here, it appears, is that Unstoppable wants to know if non-DNS qualitative factors, such as the existence of an alt-TLD matching an applied-for string, will be taken into account.

That’s a good question, and as the AGB currently stands it appears to be up to the Technical Review Team that will conduct the name collision evaluation on each application.

The Name Collision Analysis Project working group, which came up with most of the current name collision rules, seemed to have mostly ignored alt-TLDs in its work due to difficulty and timing.

Unstoppable points out that applicants with strings deemed at high risk of collisions could incur extra fees of $100,000 to $150,000, on top of the $227,000 standard application fee, so the extra clarity on the rules could avoid applicants having to reach deeper into their pockets.

While ICANN is adept at ignoring or merely paying lip service to self-serving public comments filed by commercial entities, it is bound by its bylaws to take the advice of its Advisory Committees seriously.

Comments filed by the 17-member SSAC will carry more weight, and SSAC is warning that collisions between DNS and non-DNS naming systems could raise security risks, promote instability, and create user confusion.

SSAC’s SAC130 (pdf) — formal Advisory Committee advice — makes four recommendations related to name collisions. One is:

The AGB should explicitly state that the TRT is allowed to include evaluating potential collisions with known, widely used alternative naming systems and other external sources, as these can create foreseeable security and stability risks for DNS users.

If ICANN adopts the SSAC recommendations, it seems the TRT will be encumbered with the heavy burden of figuring out how, when and why an alt-TLD and an applied-for gTLD create risks so unacceptable that the applied-for string should be blocked.

Another question that has been raised in recent weeks is whether alt-TLD operators should be able to use mechanisms such as Community Priority Evaluation and Community Objection to secure their TLDs or disrupt other applications.

Could Unstoppable, for example, claim that its cohort of .wallet alt-TLD registrants constitute a protected “community” and thus get a priority approval?

The company could certainly try, but experts in the policy-making community and ICANN staff seem to think the point-based CPE mechanism is designed in such a way to make such a claim incredibly difficult to back up.

ICANN will consider all of the public comments over the coming weeks and months before making changes, if any, to the AGB.

There are hundreds of thousands of alt-TLDs out there — over 6,000 are even carried by a handful of ICANN-accredited registrars — but it’s not clear how many are actually used.

With that in mind, should ICANN offer additional protections to blockchain-based alt-TLDs, many new gTLD applicants would face the very real risk of additional friction and huge extra costs.

Wine producers worried about new gTLDs

American vintners are worried that someone might steal their protected regional names in the next new gTLD round.

The Napa Valley Vintners has written to ICANN to “express strong opposition to the creation of any generic top-level domain
(gTLDs) that uses our distinctive name.”

The trade association asks that the names of wine-producing areas of the States be added to the Reserved Names List in the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook.

That list currently is limited to the names of intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, and Red Cross/Crescent related entities.

The NVV points out that the names of wine-producing regions are protected by US law — you can’t say your wine comes from Napa unless it was in fact made there.

According to Wikipedia, there are 276 protected American Viticultural Areas in 34 states. More than half are in California.

Some of these names actually have a small degree of protection already, but only accidentally. The string “Napa” would be considered a protected geographic string until the current AGB rules, for example, but only if somebody wanted to run .napa as a city-gTLD.

The issue of protecting wine-related geographic indicators has come up at ICANN before. While it was processing the applications for .wine and .vin in 2014, there was a protracted bust-up in the Governmental Advisory Committee about whether they should go ahead.

Several European governments pressed ICANN to ban or delay .wine, now an Identity Digital gTLD, until promises were made about protecting names like “Champagne” and “Rioja” at the second level.

France in particular got very pissed off, but ultimately objections were dropped after the registry made some kind of deal with the wine-makers.

The NVV letter is cc’d to the federal government’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, presumably to send the message that the group is not messing about.

The letter (pdf) is addressed to “The Honorable Sally Costerton”, under the apparent assumption that she’s still ICANN’s acting CEO. That hasn’t been true for the last eight months. Also, as lovely as she is, I’m not sure she qualifies for that particular honorific.

Loads of firms flunk out of next-round gTLD back-end program

A surprising number of would-be back-end registry service providers have already been eliminated from ICANN’s Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program for not submitting their applications in time.

Program statistics for May recently published reveal that 19 potential RSPs were in the system but failed to submit their required information before the application window closed May 20.

That leaves a total of 46 RSPs still in the system (pretty much in line with expectations) with 26 of those still waiting to clear their background checks. Another 15 have fully submitted their bids, though none have yet been approved.

The stats, which are broken down by geographic region, means that a maximum of one RSP from the Latin America and Caribbean region and one from Africa will be pre-approved to provide back-end services when the next new gTLD application window opens next year.

But wannabe RSPs will be able to apply again, simultaneously with their clients gTLD applications.

Asia-Pacific has 15 live applications, Europe 17 and North America 12.

The RSP program gives new gTLD applicants the chance to tick the technical services questions box by simply signing up with an already-approved provider. Being preapproved gives a pretty strong competitive advantage to RSPs in the 2026 round.