Members of ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC) are questioning the launch of a second new gTLD application round before clearly assessing the first round and its output.
The Government Advisory Committee (GAC) may once again cause changes to ICANN’s plans to launch a second round of new gTLD applications. Due to the GAC's principled stance against closed generics ("a TLD representing a string that is a generic name or term under which domains are registered and usable exclusively by the registry operator or its affiliates"), the next application round had been delayed. An ad hoc working group was created, followed by lengthy consultations that had no substantive outcome except that ICANN officially banned closed generics until further notice. Now, the GAC is concerned about an even bigger global issue.
At the recent ICANN 79 in Puerto Rico, GAC members put the question of the first round’s cost-effectiveness pointblank. The issue was raised for the first time in 2016 at ICANN 56 in Helsinki. After ICANN 78 in Hamburg last year, the Government Advisory Committee noted that it had not received a response from ICANN. Meanwhile, many GAC members insist that, without an objective and independent cost/benefit analysis of the first new gTLD application round, it would simply be unreasonable to proceed to the second round.
After that, ICANN finally sent three documents to the GAC that were developed by ICANN committees and working groups, to little satisfaction from the GAC. “I had the pleasure to read through the report, and see whether it’s a cost/benefit analysis, and whether it’s an objective and independent analysis,” the GAC representative from Denmark said. “No, and a big no.” Representatives from many European countries and North America agreed.
Observers note that ICANN should have reacted to the GAC request sooner. Now, as a new gTLD application round is coming up in 2026, the GAC simply cannot make concessions: if there is no truly objective and independent analysis in an acceptable form, but the GAC still gives a green light, its authority would seriously suffer. Reporting the news, Domain Incite noted that a genuinely objective analysis of the cost and benefits of the first round is unfeasible per se, as assessing the economic activity caused by new gTLDs is immensely complicated.
