The ICANN Board held meeting last weekend. Its official results have not yet been published, but one of the main decisions is already known. According to the Domain Incite, the Head of the ICANN Board, Tripti Sinha, informed key figures in the domain community in a letter. “the Board has considered the GAC Advice and has determined that closed generic gTLD applications will not be permitted until such time as there is an approved methodology and criteria to evaluate whether or not a proposed closed domain is in the public interest,” the letter says.
The term Closed Generic refers to domains whose names are commonly used dictionary words, but which their potential registries intend to use only for their own purposes - without the possibility of third-party registrations. At the application stage of the first phase of the new generic top-level domain program, they were not prohibited, and such applications numbered in the dozens. But Closed Generic was strongly opposed by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee. As a result, already in 2013, the possibility of delegating such domains was temporarily blocked, which negatively affected the plans of many companies.
The solution to the Closed Generic issue was also considered as one of the key conditions for the start of the second stage of the new domains program. However, years of negotiations and working group meetings involving representatives of the Governmental Advisory Committee, the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), and the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) have failed to produce even the semblance of a compromise solution. Representatives of the working group once again noted the lack of any progress in August last year. And the current decision of the ICANN board Puts an official end to this issue for the coming years.
