Applicant Guidebook

It can be a scary world out there in cyberspace, even for big companies with ample resources. Just ask the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and others, who recently saw their domain names ending in .RO, the Romanian ccTLD, hacked. The attack, which hijacked the DNS records of the domain names and pointed them to a server in the Netherlands, came less than a week after Eboz, a little-known hacker group out of Turkey, attacked these and other companies’ .PK (Pakistan) domain names in mid-November.

In other words, November wasn’t a great month for ccTLD domain names in terms of security. In addition to the .RO and .PK hacks, Network World reported that .EU gained popularity among hackers and cybercriminals as a target for attacks and other malicious activities in November as well.

Registering domain names in ccTLDs has long been a bit of a gamble for corporations. On one hand, maintaining a digital presence in key country spaces is important, but on the other hand, certain ccTLDs have a history of being vulnerable to cyber attacks, hacks, malware and other threats. Of course, some ccTLDs, like .UK, .JP and .DE are run more securely and pose much less of a risk (as we discussed in an earlier blog post), but many ccTLDs are not run in a very stable and secure manner, and therefore are vulnerable to attacks or other kinds of disruptions, causing sites to go down.

So what does all of this have to do with new gTLDs? This blog is, after all, called gTLD Strategy, not ccTLD Strategy. Well, for many brand owners, one of the perks of applying for one or more new gTLDs was the ability to potentially move away from risky, insecure ccTLDs, and instead move their international sites under their own gTLDs. So as opposed to Google.ro or Yahoo.pk, companies may opt to use Romania.Google or PK.Yahoo, which they will have much more control over in terms of security.

There is a slight obstacle: in Specification 5 of the sample Registry Agreement provided in the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook, gTLD operators are required to initially reserve two-character labels as well as country and territory names. The good news is, gTLD owners can go through an administrative procedure to release these names in order to use them once their gTLDs are up and running.

This requirement should not derail brand owners who applied for new gTLDs from working to launch their new gTLDs soon – the bottom line here is that new gTLDs offer brand owners a great opportunity to move away from the potentially vulnerable world of ccTLDs while still offering geographically specific and unique content to their consumers around the world.

What are the odds that the same week we decide to run a series about the financial aspects of applying for and running a new gTLD, ICANN publishes a set of guidelines for the Continued Operations Instrument (COI)? Maybe it’s because the COI is a question that has been on the minds of almost every applicant we’ve talked to. Or maybe we should chalk it up to a holiday miracle.

Either way, in an announcement published Friday, ICANN listed its estimations of what it will cost to cover critical registry functions for three years for various numbers of domain names. Here are those cost guidelines: (more...)

This post is the final installment of last week’s gTLD finance series. Today, we’re going to talk about tips to answer ICANN’s Financial Capability questions.

In keeping with its “one-size-fits-all” approach, ICANN designed the scoring system of the gTLD application to ensure that only established entities that with the technical and monetary wherewithal to operate a gTLD registry will be awarded extensions. (more...)

This week here on the gTLD Strategy blog, we’re going to be talking finance. Specifically, we’ll be breaking down the costs of applying for and operating a new gTLD, the application questions that deal with finances, and a little thing called the Continuing Operations Instrument (COI). Today, we’re going to discuss the COI and the options applicants have available to them.

As we mentioned in yesterday's post, the Applicant Guidebook requires all applicants to submit the same information, regardless of whether they are multinational corporations with billions of dollars in revenue, or globetrotting groups of entrepreneurs scrambling to find investors willing to back their .IDEA. (more...)