ICANN to throw millions more at cheapo gTLDs

ICANN wants to increase the number of new gTLD applications it will subsidize from its own coffers, as well as the size of the discounts it will provide.

The Applicant Support Program was originally budgeted at $10 million, with half coming from application fees and half coming from the proceeds of auctions from the 2012 application round.

The plan was to offer up to 45 qualifying applicants a 75% discount on their application fees, along with a collection of other perks such as hookups with pro-bono consultants.

But it turns out the ASP was oversubscribed — there are currently 75 organizations vying for the discount, and ICANN seems to suspect most or all will be found eligible for support.

About a month ago, after public comment, the ICANN board of directors requisitioned an extra $4.9 million from the auction proceeds war chest to cover the extra subsidies.

But the Governmental Advisory Committee and At-Large Advisory Committee have both recently recommended that ICANN increases the discount to 85% — about $192,500 of the $227,000 base evaluation fee.

So now the board wants to know if the community is cool with it dipping into the auction proceeds to cover the difference to the tune of an extra $3.2 million.

It’s asking for feedback via correspondence, outside of the usual more formal public comment process, by April 12.

Introducing Stringtel, my new free new gTLD tool

I’ve launched Stringtel, a free, industry-first string discovery and risk mitigation tool for new gTLD applicants.

Stringtel is designed to help applicants reduce the risk of their chosen gTLD strings being banned or incurring extra costs during the application process, as well as helping them discover potentially valuable undelegated strings.

The TL;DR

Stringtel gives you data that will help you pick a good string to apply for, and tells you some of the risks that string might present during the application process.

The goal is to help applicants avoid wasting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on crappy applications.

Risk mitigation

Stringtel implements the string-related rules in the latest version of ICANN’s New gTLD Applicant Guidebook, along with other risk factors, leveraging a database of almost a million possibly problematic strings, to offer applicants a quick look into issues that could kill or complicate their applications.

Enter a string and Stringtel will tell you if it would be blocked outright under AGB rules, or could trigger additional analysis, objections, fees, or contention with other applicants.

Stringtel does dozens of risk checks, along with countless associated string similarity checks, to give you a shortlist of the most likely reasons your application might fail.

Opportunity identification

New gTLDs might have a better chance of succeeding when they reflect how domains are already being used.

Stringtel analyzes over 180 million domains across .com, .net and .org, counting how often specific strings appear immediately to the left of the dot.

If a string is already widely used as a domain ending, that’s a signal of existing demand. For example, if tens of thousands of domains already end in “bakery”, that suggests a .bakery gTLD could have a ready-made market.

Essentially, Stringtel shows you where registrants are already behaving as if the dot were somewhere else — and where a new gTLD could turn that behavior into shorter domains.

It also helps filter out strings that look appealing but have little real-world usage, reducing the risk of applying for a gTLD nobody actually wants.

And because everyone keeps asking…

No, Stringtel does not record your searches. The data would be useless. I have no visibility whatsoever into what you’re searching for. Neither does anybody else.

Thanks to the sponsors

Many thanks go to Stringtel’s two launch sponsors: Hello Registry and John Matson Consulting.

Hello Registry, a venture of leading ccTLD registries CIRA (.ca) and SIDN (.nl) hosted a webinar on March 31 explaining how to apply for and operate a new gTLD.

Matson has launched TLD.fit, a financial modelling tool that helps new gTLD applicants build their business cases before they pull the trigger on an application.

ICANN maps out new gTLD timeline

ICANN’s 85th public meeting kicked off in Mumbai at the weekend, the last community face-to-face before the next round of new gTLDs kicks off, and the Org took the time to spell out exactly what is expected to happen and when.

Surprisingly, given ICANN’s track record, it will hit its target of April 2026 to open the doors to applications. Unsurprisingly, given ICANN’s track record, it’s picked April 30 — the last possible day of its promised window — to do so.

The application window will remain open for 104 days. Applicants will have until August 12 to file their paperwork. It doesn’t matter when they hit submit; it’s not first-come, first-served.

Then, the process goes into quiet mode for at least two months while ICANN filters through the applications. If there’s about the same number of applications at the 2012 round — about 2,000 — ICANN reckons Reveal Day could come before ICANN 87, which begins in Muscat October 17.

So far, the timeline closely follows the 2012 round, but this time there’s a new wrinkle — applicants can change their gTLD strings to preselected “replacement strings” if they want to.

From Reveal Day, they’ll have 14 days to swap their strings if, for example, they find themselves in a contention set they don’t like the look of or if they get the vibe that they’re probably face objections.

After those two weeks are up, its String Confirmation day, expected some time in November. From that moment, the applicants are locked into their string of choice.

That’s also the day when the timer starts on the objections period, 104 days in which companies and organizations can object to applications based on criteria such as intellectual property rights, the public interest, and community rights.

Governments can also object on essentially any basis, as long as it’s well-articulated. Unilateral GAC Early Warnings are available, but a full consensus of the Governmental Advisory Committee would be needed to stand a chance at nuking an application outright.

The objection period should end some time next February. While that’s going on, some time in December, ICANN will conduct the Prioritization Draw, a lottery to decide the order in which applications will be processed.

The 2012 draw was important because the gTLDs that were first out of the traps had a measurable first-mover advantage in terms of speculative registrations. With hundreds of gTLDs now on the market, I believe it will be less important this time around.

After the draw, applicants will have to wait half a year before they are finally notified which contention sets, if any, they fit into, after the results of the String Similarity Review have been published.

ICANN has yet to select the panel for this review or create its detailed guidelines, but it’s expect to name it chosen vendor some time in Q2.

Glitch redux: ICANN screws up new gTLD security again

No lessons learned from 2012? ICANN admitted this morning that a glitch in its Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program exposed the identities of more than a dozen companies to their rivals.

The Org fessed up that some companies looking to get pre-approved as RSPs were able to see “identifiable organizational information” belonging to another user when using ICANN’s technical testing system.

“A total of 14 of 26 organizations using RST OT&E were affected. All affected organizations have been notified,” ICANN said. “No personal data was exposed, with the exception of a single minor and limited instance.”

It doesn’t sound like any gTLD application intentions were revealed — that part of the program doesn’t open until next year.

There were probably not too many surprises among the leaks. The landscape of the RSP market is well understood.

The only exceptions that spring to mind would be ccTLD registries that have not yet revealed their plans for the gTLD space, and completely new market entrants that have not yet tipped their hand.

The glitch sounds remarkably familiar for ICANN watchers with long memories. A bug discovered in 2015 exposed much more data, and about applicants themselves, but it was only exploited by one person on a handful of occasions.

That “glitch” led to allegations of hacking and trade secret theft and a long-running Independent Review Process case that wasn’t resolved until October 2023.

ICANN said it has taken down its testing environment to fix the bug and has hired an outside consultant to kick the tires.

This delay means testing will be offline for around two weeks, coming back November 12 at the earliest, and the reveal date for the list of participating RSPs has been pushed back from December 9 to an unspecified future date we realistically have to assume will be in the new year.

It’s not expected to delay the April 2026 opening of the next application round.

Unstoppable wants to be a registry back-end

Unstoppable Domains has applied to ICANN to become a back-end registry services provider, according to the company’s CEO.

Matt Gould told DI that the company is currently going through the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program, which pre-approves RSPs prior to next year’s next round of applications.

There are 27 companies with applications submitted to the program, according to ICANN’s latest stats, but Unstoppable is the first confirmed market newcomer.

The company is a recently accredited registrar, but is best-known for selling names on non-DNS blockchain naming systems.

Gould said Unstoppable plans to use its RSP accreditation for its own gTLD applications and those of its crypto-company clients. It doesn’t sound like it will be aggressively competing for customers in the traditional DNS space.

The accreditation is necessary because Unstoppable intends to vertically integrate, marrying traditional DNS with on-chain names in its gTLDs, so extra technical work is needed, Gould said.

Unstoppable is building its registry infrastructure using Google’s open-source Nomulus software, he said.

.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.

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.

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.