This week the ICANN corporation will hold its Board meeting with the agenda including a number of quite important items. Possibly, the most interesting is the discussion of the procedure for cancelling the applications for new domains submitted way back in 2012, during the first stage of the program for new generic top-level domains.
So far, there are no details on the procedure rules. Still, it may obviously apply to at least 15 applications that have remained ungranted for over 10 years already. The first and most obvious candidate for final cancellation is the application by Nameshop for .IDN domain name. This combination of letters is a code for Indonesia protected by international standards, and therefore the domain cannot be delegated under any circumstances. ICANN has repeatedly explained this to Nameshop and asked it to withdraw its application, but in vain.
Several major companies have so far failed to withdraw their ungranted domain applications, for example .TATA (by Indian industrial Tata Group of companies) or .SALON (by L’Oreal). Yet more intriguing is the destiny of the application for the .WEB domain. At the first stage of the new domain program, it was considered as the most valuable lot and a potential future competitor to the .COM domain. At the ICANN auction for the right to manage the domain, the unknown company Nu Dot Co won, having paid a huge sum of $135 million.
It turned out soon that its participation was financed by the Verisign company, to which Nu Dot Co immediately assigned its rights to the .WEB domain. It caused an uproar from the losing bidders. The echoes of this uproar continue to this day: Altanovo, the successor to the now-vanished Afilias, one of the candidates for the domain, continue to initiate more and more proceedings trying to prove that the auction had been held in breach of the ICANN regulations and seeking an overturn of its results.
