ICANN directors expect further delays
Two key persons at ICANN have independently expressed the same concerns: both doubt that Applicant Guidebook is to be approved in March. However, time ticks as the newly-created registries are already impatient and try to force the process.
ICANN's chairman Peter Dengate Thrush doubts that the process is likely to move fast. “We don’t think we’ll be able to approve the final applicant guidebook in March,” Dengate Thrush said in an interview with World Trademark Review. One reason that makes sense following chairman Dengate Thrush's doubts is that GAC's concerns to ICANN's version of the Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs could be so critical that ICANN will involuntarily have to consult the community first, and that could greatly delay the process of implementing the rules for creating new gTLDs again.
Kurt Pritz, ICANN's senior vice president of stakeholder relations, expressed his doubts to DomainIncite.com after his keynote at .nxt conference: Pritz thinks that the Guidebook “probably won’t be approved in San Francisco”. Rod Beckstrom, in turn, didn't comment on the issue.
Meanwhile, ICM Registry, a company that is to run .xxx gTLD, calls on ICANN to get a quick approval of the domain. Company president Stuart Lawley notes that it took ICM Registry seven years of waiting for ICANN's final decision so far. The company urges ICANN to make a point in Brussels, but the agenda for the upcoming meeting doesn't contain anything regarding the proposed adult domain. As Kevin Murphy of DomainIncite.com notes, ICM Registry has its operational costs at $100,000, so literally each month of further waiting hits the company pretty hard.
GAC and ICANN are to meet in Brussels on February 28 and March 1, 2011. The main themes of the meeting will be: the trademark issues, controversial domain registrations and other concerns that GAC has expressed regarding ICANN-proposed version of Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs.
As controversial as it can be: .gay
Neustar and DotGay LLC have signed a contract. Neustar is to provide back-end registry services for DotGay LLC, one of the proposed registries for new .gay gTLD. Another applicant, DotGay Alliance, had a deal settled with Minds+Machines earlier.
All the controversy around .gay seems to be pretty interesting due to many reasons. Firstly, it's a good chance to see what comes out from the situation where there are two applicants for one gTLD. At the moment, we can only see each company is heavily positioning itself for ICANN: i.e. DotGay LLC is choosing Neustar as a company that has a lot of experience in operating registries with a lot of traffic, with Scott Seitz, CEO of DotGay, saying that «While security is always a concern for any gTLD, the GLBT community is at a higher risk of discrimination, making system integrity a critical component in the selection of a registry partner». On the other hand, DotGay Alliance is trying to use all known ways of raising the community awareness (which is one of the most important parts of implementing a new TLD) along with picking Minds+Machines, the company that had succeeded in running .eco domain through all the procedures required for a new TLD launch.
But the thing is that the noble duel might as well not take place in case ICANN and GAC meeting in Brussels later this February would bring unpleasant results for so-called 'controversial' domains. In case GAC's submitted comments would be included to the Applicant Guidebook 'as is', things might just be bad for such applicants. In this case any GAC member could object to the application, and if no other member raises the objection against this, the question is settled and ICANN is to deny registration of the TLD in question. Taking into account that there are representatives of Arabic countries where the sexual minorities are illegal present in GAC, this state of events could easily outlaw .gay in the future.
