ICANN announced offering to delay the signing of Registry Agreements for dot-brands. The deadline was postponed for nine months compared to the original. Thus, registrars are not in a rush till July 29, 2015.
According to ICANN rules, all new gTLD applicants should sign the contract with the corporation in a nine-month period after they receive a “Contracting Information Request” from ICANN. However, in the case of dot-brands several clauses of the standard Registry Agreement were not applicable. In particular, requirements about the conduction of a sunrise period or equal treatment of registrars: obviously, for dot-brands there is no need for this. Corresponding amendments to the contract for dot-brands were finalized only May 14 of this year, which didn’t leave enough time for registrars to sign the document.
After negotiations of ICANN representatives with the dot-brand working group, they decided to postpone the deadline. Dot-brand applicants obviously should be pleased with this turn of events, however independent experts show some concerns. In their opinion, delay in the launch of dot-brands may have a negative impact on the whole program of new domains. They believe that mass adoption of well-known dot-brands would have contributed to the popularity of all new gTLDs. However now they cannot count on this effect.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet, considers the delay to be quite understandable: “New gTLD program is the first experience of ICANN, domain space has never changed so much before. Obviously, there were a lot of obstacles in the realization of the program that were not taken into account before. Deadlines, originally planned by ICANN, were postpones several times, the majority of domain zones were opened much later that planned. Now the very same situation is repeating itself for dot-brand domains.”
