ICANN has upped its expected new gTLD application fee after approving a costly new plan to tack name collisions. The baseline price of applying for a single string, most recently pegged at $220,000, is now expected to go up by $5,000, according to a recent resolution of the ICANN board of directors. The board earlier […]
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ICANN is to ban new gTLD applicants from paying each other off if they apply for the same strings, removing a business model that saw tens of millions of dollars change hands in the 2012 application round. But, in a twist, applicants will be able to submit second-choice strings along with their main application, allowing […]
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“The goal is for the next application round to begin within one year of the close of the application submission period for the initial round.” Believe it or not, that sentence appears in the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook that ICANN published in June 2012, 12 years of seemingly interminable review and revision ago. Ah, […]
The post The new gTLD next, next and next round first appeared on Domain Incite.
It’s finally happened. Somebody has announced an application for a new gTLD that will almost certainly fall foul of ICANN’s rules and be rejected. The would-be applicant is Farmsent, a United Arab Emirates startup that is building a blockchain-based marketplace for farmers and buyers of farm produce, and its domains partner is Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable […]
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ICANN plans to ban private auctions in the next new gTLD application round, chair Tripti Sinha has told governments. The board of directors plans to accept the Governmental Advisory Committee’s recent advice to “prohibit the use of private auctions in resolving contention sets in the next round of New gTLDs”, Sinha told her GAC counterpart […]
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Governments have upped the stakes in their opposition to new gTLDs being auctioned off privately, now calling for an outright prohibition on the practice. ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee today published its formal advice coming out of last week’s public meeting in Kigali, calling for ICANN to “prohibit the use of private auctions in resolving contention […]
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The base new gTLD application fee could top $300,000, according to an analysis released by ICANN at its meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, this morning. The per-gTLD fee will likely range between $208,000 and $293,000, according to the latest estimate, but this does not include mandatory fees that have yet to be figured out that as […]
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Is ICANN stifling competition and pricing out the Global South by setting its new gTLD evaluation fees too high? A great many community volunteers seem to think so, judging by recent conversations. The Org last week revealed that it plans to charge registry service providers that want to participate in the next application round $92,000 […]
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The number of gTLD registry back-end providers could more than double during the next new gTLD application round, ICANN’s board of directors has been told.
There are currently about 40 registry services providers serving the gTLD industry, but ICANN is preparing for this to leap to as many as 100 when it launches its Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program for the 2026 application round.
“We’re preparing, I think, for roughly a hundred or so applications which will include the 40 existing providers that we’re aware of, and another 60 or so is sort of our rough market sizing,” Russ Weinstein, a VP at ICANN’s Global Domains Division, told the board during a meeting in Paris last week.
The number is based on what ICANN is preparing to be able to handle, rather than confirmed applicants to the RSP program, it seems.
“We are hoping to see some diversification and new entrants into the space,” Weinstein said.
Board member Edmon Chung elaborated that he expects most of the new entrants to be ccTLD registries hoping to break into the gTLD market.
“We can expect a few more ccTLD registries that might be be interested,” he said. “We’re probably not expecting a completely new startup that just comes in and becomes a registry, but beyond the 40, probably a few more ccTLDs.”
ccTLD registries already active in the gTLD market following the 2012 application round include Nominet, Nic.at and AFNIC, which tend to serve clients that are based in the same timezone and use the same native language.
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Unstoppable Domains and Women in Tech Global have announced that they plan to apply for a new gTLD when ICANN opens the next application round.
They want .witg, which Unstoppable has already launched on its blockchain-based naming system. They cost $10 a pop.
Unstoppable says the names come with some social networking features, as well as the usual ability to address cryptocurrency wallets.
The company has also recently announced gTLD application partnerships with POG Digital for .pog, Clay Nation for .clay and Pudgy Penguin for .pudgy.
Unstoppable is mainly competing here with D3 Global, which is also recruiting blockchain businesses that want to embrace the DNS when the next round opens.
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A move by ICANN to grant itself more formal “content policing” powers may be dead, after the community was split on the issue and governments failed to back the move.
The Governmental Advisory Committee yesterday sent comments essentially opposing, for now at least, the idea of ICANN reforming its bylaws to give it more powers over internet content, making it very unlikely that ICANN would be able to get such amendments approved by its community overseers.
The comments came a few days after ICANN extended the deadline for responses to a December 2023 consultation on whether applicants in the next new gTLD round should be able to sign up to so-called Registry Voluntary Commitments that regulate content in their zones.
RVCs would be an appendix to ICANN Registry Agreements which would commit a registry to, for example, ban certain types of registrant or certain types of content from domains in their gTLDs.
They’re basically a rebadged version of the Public Interest Commitments found in RAs from the 2012 round, in which the likes of .sucks agreed to ban cyberbullying and .music agreed to ban piracy.
But they’ve got ICANN’s board and lawyers worried, because the Org’s bylaws specifically ban it from restricting or regulating internet content. They’re worried that the RVCs might not be enforceable and that ICANN may wind up in litigation as a result.
ICANN has therefore proposed a framework (pdf) in which RVCs would be enforced by ICANN only after an agreed-upon third-party auditor or monitor found that a registry was out of compliance.
The board sent out several pages of questions to all of its Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees in December, asking among other things whether the bylaws needed to be amended to clarify ICANN’s role, but the responses were split along traditional lines.
Registries and registrars were aligned: there’s no need for a bylaws change, because ICANN should not allow RVCs that regulate content into its contracts at all.
“ICANN should maintain its existing bylaws which exclude content from its mission, and allowing any changes to this could be a slippery slope opening ICANN to becoming a broader ‘content police’,” the Registrars Stakeholder Group said in its response, giving this amusing example:
An example of a content restriction is provided in the proposed implementation framework for .backyardchickens (e.g. no rooster-related content). Restricting rooster-related content would require a significant amount of policing, and could even prohibit valuable content that would benefit such a TLD. For example, a backyard hen farmer might want to promote the pedigree lineage of the roosters that helped sire the hens, show pictures of the roosters that were the fathers, etc. All of this could in theory be prohibited,but would also require review and subjective analysis. This would be a very slippery slope for ICANN, and a substantial departure from its mission. Restricting rooster content would then put ICANN in the place of enforcing laws that prohibit backyard roosters, rather than relying upon the competent government authorities charged with overseeing residential animal husbandry.
The Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group was more strident in its tone, even raising the possibility of legal action if ICANN went down the content policing route, saying “the best way for the Board to address content-related PICs and RVCs is to make it clear that it will reject them categorically.” It added:
The prohibition on content regulation in ICANN’s mission is extremely important and very clear. Mission limitations were a critical part of the accountability reforms that were required before ICANN would be released from US government control in 2016… NCSG will mount a legal challenge to any attempt to dilute this part of the mission.
The opposing view was held by the Business Constituency, the Intellectual Property Constituency, and the At-Large Advisory Committee, which is tasked with representing the interests of ordinary internet users.
They all said that ICANN should be able to allow content-related RVCs in registry contracts, but the IPC and BC said that no bylaws amendment is needed because the bylaws already have a carve-out that enables the Org to enforce PICs in its agreements. The ALAC said a bylaws amendment is needed.
“There is a distinction between ICANN regulating, i.e imposing ‘rules and restrictions on’ services and content, versus the registry operator voluntarily proposing and submitting to such rules and restrictions,” the IPC wrote.
“There is also a distinction between ICANN directly enforcing such rules and restrictions on third parties, i.e. registrants, versus ICANN holding a registry operator to compliance with the specifics of a contractual commitment,” it added.
The last community group to submit a response, fashionably late, was the GAC, which filed its response yesterday having reviewed all the other responses submitted so far. The GAC arguably has the loudest voice at ICANN, but its comments were probably the least committed.
The GAC said that ICANN should only go ahead with a bylaws amendment if it has community backing, but that the community currently lacks consensus. It said, “at this stage there are not sufficient elements to justify commencing a fundamental bylaws amendment to explicitly enable the enforcement of content-related restrictions”.
However, the GAC still thinks that RVCs “will continue to serve as tools for addressing GAC concerns pertaining to new gTLD applications during the next round” and that it wants them to be enforceable by ICANN, with consequences for registries found in breach.
The GAC said that it “will continue to explore options to address this important question”.
This all means that ICANN is a long way from getting the community support it would need to push through a bylaws amendment related to content policing. That’s considered one of the “Fundamental Bylaws” and can only be changed with substantial community support.
Such amendments require the backing of the Empowered Community. That’s the entity created in 2016 to oversee ICANN after it severed ties with the US government. It comprises individuals from five groups — the GAC, the GNSO, the ccNSO, the ALAC and the Address Supporting Organization.
For a fundamental bylaws amendment to get over the line, at least three of these groups must approve it and no more than one must object.
With the GNSO, given its divisions, almost certainly unable to gather enough affirmative votes, the GAC seemingly on the fence, and the ASO and ccNSO recusing themselves so far, only the ALAC looks like a clear-cut yes vote on a possible future bylaws amendment.
Perhaps that’s why ICANN chair Tripti Sinha has written to the ASO and ccNSO in the last few days to ask them whether they’d like to think again about ducking out of the consultation, giving them an extra two weeks to submit comments after the original March 31 deadline.
The ccNSO handles policy for country-code domains and the ASO for IP addresses. Both have previously told ICANN that gTLD policy is none of their business, but Sinha has urged them both to chip in anyway, because “the ICANN Bylaws govern us all”.
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