The ICANN Board resolved to provide a refund of $5,000 to all new gTLD registries. This sum was paid by every registry to access the Trademark Clearinghouse database, which handles trademark validation for sunrise periods and other rights protection mechanisms.
However, all the necessary services, including access to the Trademark Clearinghouse, were supposed to be funded from ICANN application fees ($185,000). Domain Incite reports that last October registries pointed the fact out to ICANN and asked why they were double-charged. Eight months later, ICANN admitted its mistake.
It appears that the refunds will not come out of the company’s operational budget (which must be cut drastically) but from a special fund of leftover application fees that now has about $80 million. In total, ICANN will have to pay over $6 million. While $5,000 is not life-changing money for a registry, it is a big sum for large portfolio registries such as Donuts, which stands to receive about $1.5 million in total.
