gTLD Strategy

Yesterday, ICANN issued another announcement about the batching process for new gTLD applications. For the most part, it’s nothing we don’t already know (and haven’t already blogged about), but peppered throughout the announcement are some interesting new things to consider.

For one, we know that applicants will log back into the TLD Application System (TAS) to select and hit their target time. We now know that applicants will also be able to use a testing feature to gauge the response time of their system and, in some cases, their trigger finger. This can be helpful for those applicants who are still trying to decide whether to use a technology solution to hit their target time, or to just hit the button manually.

Another thing we already knew, that we mentioned way back in our first post about batching, is that it will not only be the secondary timestamp that determines the batch of each application. ICANN will employ a “round robin” approach to make sure that each geographical region is equally represented in the earliest batches. In other words, the first five applications to go into Batch 1 will be those with the best Digital Archery score from North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and Asia, the Pacific and Australia.

As we said, we already knew about this round robin approach to geographic to ensure geographic inclusivity. But as more and more applicants have come forward with their plans and we’ve gotten a better sense of the field of applicants, the implications of the round robin have become clear. Essentially, the round robin could make batching five times more competitive for U.S. companies than anyone originally expected.

And finally, we already knew that applications in contention sets would be placed into the batch of the earliest application in that contention set. But in this announcement, ICANN clarified that this automatic grouping will only apply to strings that are exact matches – so two applications for .DOG will be placed together, but not applications for .DOG and .BOG, for example.

After this initial grouping, the String Similarity Panel will establish complete contention sets. Once that takes place, similar strings could be reassigned to earlier batches – but they will not oust other applications (bumping those at the end of the list of 500 in Batch 1 to Batch 2, for example). That means we could end up with more than 500 applications in Batch 1.

Batching is set to kick off tomorrow. Learning the results, particularly what applications are in Batch 1, will be important because the success of the gTLDs delegated in the first batch could set the tone for the delegation of new gTLDs in all other batches. But as this is all unfolding, the critics of the Digital Archery are not exactly giving up: just today, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) made clear its intention to send a letter to the ICANN Board offering its “advice” on the Digital Archery process and recommending that ICANN not move forward with Digital Archery prior to that.

So while ICANN did clarify a number of batching issues with this announcement, it seems safe to say that nothing is really settled just yet.

Anyone who put their money on June 13 as the date when ICANN would reveal the list of new gTLD applicants and their applied-for strings got some great news last night. In a new update, ICANN announced a series of important upcoming dates. First, the TLD Application System (TAS) will close tonight at 23:59 UTC, or 7:59 PM EDT, as scheduled. The Batching process will officially begin on June 8 and close on June 28. And during that timeframe, Reveal Day will take place on June 13. (more...)

So now we know how ICANN’s Digital Archery process will work, and have a very rough idea of when that process will take place. On the surface, it may seem like having the process start before before Reveal Day is not a big deal – perhaps ICANN is even trying to make up for some time lost during the month-long TAS delay. But there could be some really serious ramifications to the timing of this process. And like so many other aspects of the New gTLD Program, these ramifications result from ICANN keeping applicants in the dark. (more...)

It’s been more than two months since ICANN first announced its plans for how to deal with the “batching” issue – how it will order new gTLD applications for evaluation – and yet there still seems to be rampant confusion around the basics of the process and its implications.

Let’s start with the basics: what exactly does ICANN mean by “batching”? Well, according to the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook, if ICANN receives substantially more than 500 new gTLD applications, which we know with certainty that it will, it will divide those applications into groups in order to evaluate them. The first batch will consist of 500 applications, and subsequent batches will each contain 400 applications. In an announcement on May 4, ICANN stated that the TLD Application System (TAS) held 2,091 applications, plus 214 potential applications for which the payments had yet to be reconciled. Assuming that all 2,305 applications make it through, there will be a total of six batches. (more...)

We may not know precisely when ICANN will finally publish the full list of new gTLD applications and applicants, but we do know that it will be at least a month from now. And certain companies have come forward over the past few weeks, announcing that they are applying for certain new gTLDs. So while we’ll have to sit tight for the full list, we at least have a small sneak peak of a few of the 2,100+ applications we’ll see on Reveal Day. Here’s what we’re looking at so far: (more...)

Last night, ICANN posted a new update about the TAS. The organization has met its deadline of May 8 to inform applicants of whether or not their user names or file names were exposed during the glitch that first became public on April 12.

But the real news is that we finally know when the TAS will come back online – mostly.

ICANN says that it is “targeting 22 May 2012 as the intended reopening date for the TLD Application System.” Once it reopens, the TAS will stay open for five business days, closing for good on May 30 (accounting for the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, May 28, here in the U.S.). (more...)

ICANN’s TLD Application System (TAS) remains offline this week as ICANN is continuing to work through the data in order to determine which applicants’ information may have been compromised during the security glitch. ICANN has said that it will likely take until May 8 to notify all of the applicants whether or not their user names or file names were exposed, but this week, the organization did publish some stats about the TAS delay: (more...)

VeriSign, Inc., the registry that operates .COM, .NET, .NAME, .CC and .TV, published its first quarter revenue figures in a press release earlier this week. The company saw its revenue top $200 million for the quarter, marking a 13 percent increase from the first quarter in 2011. (more...)

As promised, ICANN posted another update about the TAS closure on Friday night, sneaking in just minutes before the deadline it had set of 23:59 UTC (7:59 PM EDT). Essentially, because of the large volume of data that the organization has to sort through in order to fulfill its promise of alerting all applicants of whether or not their data was compromised during the security glitch, ICANN stated that at the time, it was not prepared to make an announcement about when it would reopen the TAS. Instead, the statement promised another update by Friday, April 27 at 23:59 UTC (7:59 PM EDT). (more...)