New TLDs

DotGreen Debrief: How the Applicant Auction Helps Mission-Driven Applicants

DotGreen announced on Friday that it has withdrawn its application for .green from ICANN's new gTLD program. We were surprised to hear the news, particularly after all of the effort that DotGreen has put into building a community and a movement around its application. While we at Innovative Auctions agree with Annalisa that the ICANN Last Resort auction would have been a poor choice for the DotGreen Community, we believe that the Applicant Auction is a great tool for single-string applicants who want to see their TLD used for a community purpose. more

DotGreen Is No More

Kevin reported on this last night. As you can see from the reactions to his post a lot of people are surprised, shocked and even quite upset that the DotGreen application has been withdrawn. It's not the only application for the string, which is why it was withdrawn, but to many people in the ICANN space it was the applicant everyone associated with the string. The unfortunate reality of the new TLD process is that money speaks more loudly than anything else. more

Phishing: A Look Into the E-Crime Landscape

At the recent Anti-Phishing Working Group meeting in San Francisco, Rod Rasmussen and I published our latest APWG Global Phishing Survey. Phishing is a distinct kind of e-crime, one that's possible to measure and analyze in depth. Our report is a look at how criminals act and react, and what the implications are for the domain name industry. more

Key Steps for Operational Readiness and Successful Launch of a New gTLD

31 August 2013 marked a historic day for Internet users worldwide. It marked a very key day in the introduction of new gTLDs. On that day ICANN, who oversees the gTLD programme, six years in the making, announced the completion of gTLD Initial Evaluation (IE) results based applicant's ability to demonstrate their financial, technical and operational capability to operate and manage a TLD Registry. more

Reflections on EUI’s New Community Priority Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLDs

The new Community Priority Evaluation (CPE) guidelines prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), and published by ICANN are now past their feedback period. We, at Radix, believe that ICANN has received feedback from approximately 10 stakeholders, and I for one, am looking forward to those being published. In light of the fact that none of the comments that ICANN received have been made public yet, I decided to blog about my multiple concerns with the new guidelines. Sparing a thought for the not-so-involved reader, I have limited my rant to some of the more important issues. more

ICANN Must Now Decide String Similarity Question

Yesterday, a decision on a string confusion objection was reached by a dispute resolution provider that resulted in a scenario that ICANN and the Applicant Guidebook had not addressed - conflicting opinions have been rendered by expert panelists ruling on the exact same pair of strings. One of our applications now hangs in the balance. The expert panelist for the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) assigned to decide the string confusion objection filed by VeriSign against United TLD's .CAM application, issued a decision sustaining VeriSign's objection that .CAM and .COM are confusingly similar. more

A Look at Closed vs. Open New gTLDs

The essay analyzes some of the strengths and weaknesses of closed and open new gTLDs. The success of the gTLD to a large degree rests on the successful design and implementation of an effective digital business model. A closed gTLD is one whose owner uses it for exclusive content - for example, the use of .book exclusively for Amazon books. Conversely, if Amazon opens up .book, other book sellers and libraries would be able to set up sub-domains, sites where they controlled content. more

ICANN 47: Policy Debates and Cautious Optimism

A strange feeling came over me after I got home from ICANN 47 in Durban, something I haven't felt after an ICANN meeting before. The feeling? Optimism. I'm optimistic, albeit cautiously so, about the future of ICANN and by extension, hopefully that of Internet governance in general. If the meeting in Durban is any indication, we've come a long way in the past year. There were no indicted war criminals invited to dinner. And though it may be too soon to say for sure, I don't think a letter will be sent to the government of South Africa about the quality of the hotel. more

Four New Generic Top Level Domains

At its meeting in Durban, ICANN signed contracts with the applicants for four new top level domains. The new domains are ????, which means "web" in Arabic, ?????? and ????, which mean "online" and "site" in Russian, and ??, which means "game" in Chinese. They should give us an interesting hint about the future of the new TLDs, because all four are utterly, totally, generic. more

Will the GNSO Review Be Pushed Back Another Year?

ICANN bylaws mandate periodic reviews of the organisation's main structures. For the body that handles gTLD policy making, the GNSO, that review was due to start in February this year. The review appears much needed. The GNSO Council is the manager of the gTLD policy process and as such, it has representatives of all GNSO groups. But according to repeated statements by many of those representatives, the Council's current bicameral structure has not lived up to expectations. more

Poll on New TLDs Shows Value of Brand Loyalty, Willingness to Try New Equivalents to .COMs

Internet users are willing to navigate to, use, and trust new web addresses that will be flooding the Internet later this year, and brand name websites will carry more weight with Internet users than generic sites. These are among the results of a public opinion survey commissioned by FairWinds Partners. The poll also found that the owners and operators of these new addresses should be technically prepared or risk driving away or losing traffic intended for their sites. more

The Role of Trust in Determining a New TLD’s Business Success

Warren Buffet famously said, "It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." Like it or not, every Top-Level Domain (TLD) is a brand in the eyes of the consumer. So, just how important is trust in the success of the new top-level-domains? I'm no branding expert, but I grasp that no brand, no matter how memorable, will fail to achieve its goals if it does not gain the public's trust. more

ICANN at the Inflection Point: Implications and Effects Of the GAC Beijing Communique

Although this article was first published just a few days ago, on May 8th, there have been several important intervening developments. First, on May 10th ICANN released a News Alert on "NGPC Progress on GAC Advice" that provides a timetable for how the New gTLD program Committee will deal with the GAC Communique. Of particular note is that, as the last action in an initial phase consisting of "actions for soliciting input from Applicants and from the Community', the NGPC will begin to "Review and consider Applicant responses to GAC Advice and Public Comments on how Board should respond to GAC Advice... more

What New gTLD Applicants Need Is a Quick, Lightweight Answer to the World’s Governments. Here It Is.

It's safe to say that with just a week to go before ICANN intended to sign the first contract for a new gTLD, the last thing anyone wanted was a 12-page document from the world's governments with 16 new "safeguards", six of which it wants to see applied to every new extension. But what the industry shouldn't overlook, especially in the face of the expected critical responses this week and next, is that the Governmental Advisory Committee's (GAC's) formal advice from the ICANN Beijing meeting represents an opportunity for the domain name industry to lock-in self-regulation at a critical point in its evolution. more

New Registry Agreement, All Good?

In the run-up to the launch of new gTLDs, ICANN has been negotiating both of its main supplier contracts. The registrar contract (Registrar Accreditation Agreement or RAA) negotiations are now all but complete. A new contract draft has been posted for public comment and it now seems likely that in little over a month, this will become the official new 2013 RAA. more