ICANN staff recently posted on its website an updated timeline on the new gTLD process. Attempting to be “fair and balanced,” I see some good, some bad, and some potential ugly in this timeline.

I know there are a lot of good people at ICANN working very hard to conclude the Herculean task of implementing the new gTLD process. However, ICANN just can’t help shooting itself in the foot with poorly worded and ambiguous statements. Given the extensive in-house and outside media/marketing resources available to ICANN (and ICANN’s considerable and growing budget), this inability to make even such critically important documents clear is a growing concern for me and others in the ICANN community that causes us all to wonder whether ICANN is truly ready to “go out on its own.”

The Good

It appears that ICANN is not going to rush a release of the Third Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG). ICANN had previously indicated that a third draft of the Guidebook would be released prior to the Sydney regional meeting this June. It now appears that ICANN is going to wait until it has resolved the four remaining overarching issues before publishing the next DAG. ICANN has stated that is expects to release the next version in early September. Given that the public comment period for that release apparently would not close until after ICANN’s Seoul meeting (Oct. 25-30), ICANN appears to be contemplating a comment period of at least 45 days.

The Bad

In this release, ICANN staff states that “[t]his timing enables the publication of the final Guidebook and following a communications period, the acceptance of applications in the first quarter of 2010.” But how can the ICANN staff preordain that this next DAG will be the final one or that the ICANN Board will accept it? Statements like this put the ICANN Board in a very awkward position, because if there is any slippage in this time table, prospective applicants will come to the public forum in Africa next March insisting that ICANN had promised to accept their applications in 2010Q1. Obviously, ICANN feels pressure to appease a handful of applicants that have publicly expressed their interests in moving forward ASAP with new gTLD proposals. But as a steward of the Internet, ICANN should be communicating a message that addresses the concerns of the broader Internet community. Given the numerous deadlines ICANN has missed over the last several years regarding when they would begin accepting applications for new gTLDs, ICANN should focus on completing its next deliverable-publishing DAG No. 3-before making promises about when applications will be accepted.

There are further problems declaring now that applications will definitely be accepted in 2010Q1. If ICANN staff had taken the time to read the draft proposal of the Implementation Review Team (IRT)-the group tasked by the ICANN Board to help resolve the overarching issues regarding trademark protection-they would have noticed the following recommendation: “ICANN must publish the GPML [Globally Protected Marks List] before [ICANN accepts applications] and early enough beforehand to allow for potential applicants to take the GPML into consideration should they choose to do so.”

The GPML will take some time to implement, especially because it is envisioned to be part of a proposed “IP Clearinghouse.” It’s particularly difficult to see how this could be accomplished in the timeline proposed by ICANN in light of the minimum four-month window between the finalization of the RFP (i.e., the call for gTLD applications) and the commencement of the new gTLD submission process as originally recommended in the GNSO Policy Development Process (PDP) (see Implementation Guide E). This four month hard-coded window is critical as it ensures a level playing field for all applicants-as opposed to some previous rounds, the window between the posting of final criteria and the deadline for applications was so short (six weeks back in 2000) that it gave ICANN insiders a significant advantage.

Also potentially complicating the proposed aggressive timeline is the fact that, following the Seoul meeting, the ICANN Board has only one regularly schedule Board teleconferenced planned in 2009 (for December 9).

Should the ICANN Board ultimately decide not to implement the GPML and the IP Clearinghouse, despite the apparently strong support for these concepts, the IP community will look back at ICANN’s latest timeline as the “writing on the wall” indicating that these proposals were doomed from the start because ICANN was preoccupied with meeting the 2010Q1 deadline. Such speculation and conspiracy-theorizing could all have been prevented if only ICANN had released a more thoughtfully crafted timeline.

The Ugly

While I have acknowledged (PDF) a number of reservations about the ICANN new gtLD implementation process, I must also acknowledge the hard work that some very qualified ICANN staff and consultants have been doing behind the scenes to resolve these outstanding issues. Unfortunately, senior ICANN management just isn’t properly communicating to the broader community what’s being done to address outstanding concerns about gTLDs. I very much hope the ICANN Board will address this pressing problem at its retreat next week. Continued communication failures like this are not simply unacceptable for an international organization of ICANN’s stature; indeed, they raise serious questions about how ICANN will communicate to the global community the events leading up to expiration of ICANN’s Joint Project Agreement with the U.S. Government this September-and what will happen after that.