Batching

The last time we wrote about new gTLD application batching (or metering or sequencing) here on the gTLD Strategy blog was over a month ago, when we discussed some of the comments applicants had submitted to ICANN on the matter. Now, according to an announcement made in the early hours of the morning, ICANN is proposing a new plan for prioritizing applications through the steps leading up to launch. And much to everyone’s surprise, it involves a lottery – and a surprisingly old school lottery, at that.

Here’s how ICANN proposes this process will go (key points have been bolded):

Each application will receive a Draw Number, which will be used to schedule the release of Initial Evaluation results, pre-delegation testing, and signing the contract with ICANN. Draw Numbers will be assigned in the style of a raffle – applicants must purchase paper tickets and ICANN will draw these tickets to assign each Draw Number. For readers who remember that ICANN had dismissed similar random assignment procedures because those procedures would violate California’s anti-lottery laws, this proposal should raise eyebrows.

It turns out that ICANN got around these laws by applying for a “fundraising drawings” license. But with that license comes certain restrictions. Most notably, applicants are required to purchase their tickets, which cost $100 apiece, in person. ICANN has offered to supply proxy purchasers at no charge for applicants who cannot make the trip. While this may seem onerous, the one upside to a completely manual drawing process is that it removes much of the margin for error that was present in the Digital Archery process. The one outstanding issue? ICANN has not actually been approved for this license yet, but expects to be by the end of November.

ICANN has stated that the Draw will occur between December 4 and 15 of this year, but has not yet confirmed an exact date. As stated above, the Draw Numbers will be used to schedule the release of Initial Evaluation results, which, under this proposal, will occur at a rate of 100 applications per week between March and June 2013. ICANN has said that it will give priority to IDNs to promote diversity within the Domain Name System by releasing the Initial Evaluation results of these applications first.

Later in the year, the Draw Numbers will also be used to order pre-delegation testing and signing of the Registry Agreement (by both ICANN and the applicant). Applicants can still negotiate the Registry Agreement before they begin pre-delegation testing. They will have to reach consensus with ICANN over the terms of the Agreement, and then both parties will officially sign the Agreement after pre-delegation testing. Both pre-delegation testing and Registry Agreement signing will take place at a rate of 20 applications per week, which will allow ICANN to stay within the delegation limit of 1,000 gTLDs per year. Neither Registry Agreement signing nor delegation will begin until after ICANN’s next Public Meeting in Beijing in April.

The timeline ICANN envisions in this proposal is actually slightly altered from previous projections. Whereas common wisdom held that Initial Evaluation would wrap up in June 2013, this timeline has the results being posted as soon as March. Also, the Objection Filing Period is now scheduled to end on March 13, rather than January 12. And most importantly, the first new gTLDs will begin delegating the second quarter of 2013, rather than the third quarter.

ICANN has opened up a Public Comment Forum for this proposal, and it will undoubtedly be a hot topic of conversation during next week’s Public Meeting in Toronto. Members of the FairWinds staff will be attending, and we will be providing regular updates here on the gTLD Strategy blog and on Twitter @FairWinds, so be sure to check back often.

On Thursday, ICANN will host another one of its New gTLD Program Applicant Update webinars to update applicants on topics “of interest” to them. One of those topics, of course, is the ongoing progress toward adopting a solution to resolve the issue of application batching/metering/sequencing once and for all.

Readers will remember from our earlier post, “Weighing in on Batching,” that FairWinds submitted a proposed solution during ICANN’s recently closed public comment window that followed the accounting principle, First In, First Out, or FIFO. Essentially, our solution relies on natural speed bumps and roadblocks in the new gTLD application evaluation process and puts more control in the hands of new gTLD applicants, rather than in ICANN to establish subjective delays. You can read more about our proposed solution in the post. (more...)

At the end of July, ICANN opened a public comment period to gather input from the community about how it should handle the issue of batching new gTLD applications. gTLD Strategy readers will remember that once Digital Archery met its bitter end during the last ICANN Public Meeting in Prague, the ICANN Board had not yet come up with a fair but feasible solution to the quandary of limiting the number of gTLDs entered into the root to 1,000 in a year. (more...)

In an announcement published over the weekend, ICANN issued a request for community input on “requirements for an evaluation and delegation process” for new gTLDs. Essentially, questions raised during the Public Meeting in Prague about the order in which new gTLD applications would be handled – whether at the evaluation, release, or delegation phases – are still without answers, so now ICANN is once again turning to the community for advice. (more...)

In the few days since ICANN made the decision to suspend the Digital Archery system for batching applications, discussions about next step have, not altogether unsurprisingly, focused not on how to improve Digital Archery, but alternatives to replace it entirely. Perhaps most significant is the groundswell that seems to be forming around the idea of tossing out batching completely, and instead evaluating all applications at once. (more...)

Yesterday, ICANN made waves by announcing that it had suspended the Digital Archery process for batching. In the public statement, ICANN stated, “The primary reason is that applicants have reported that the timestamp system returns unexpected results depending on circumstances." The decision came when the Digital Archery process was a mere five days away from closing – and still, only 20 percent of applicants had recorded a timestamp, or fired their digital “arrows” at that point, amounting to about 386 of the 1,930 applications. (more...)

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. (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...)