ICANN 39: Wrap-Up
It’s been a few weeks since the dust settled from the recent ICANN International Public Meeting which was held in Cartagena, Colombia. The .SiTE team sat front and center, focused fully on the New gTLD process to gain insight on what is happening on the New gTLD front. Here’s the skinny.
Just before the meeting kicked off on December 5th, 2010, ICANN was keen on approving the Proposed Final Draft of the Applicant Guidebook (Proposed Final AGB), but the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) wasn’t about to allow ICANN to move on without requiring ICANN to explain its actions.
Head of NTIA, Lawrence Strickling, posted a letter to ICANN President and CEO, Rod Beckstrom, as part of ICANN’s public comment period open for the latest draft of the applicant guidebook. As a signer of the Affirmation of Commitments, NTIA asserted that ICANN needed to follow the obligations in these commitments and provide the community with detailed feedback on how it came to many of the policy decisions in the current draft of the guidebook. ICANN’s accountability to the community would become one of the main themes of the meeting.
Prior to the meeting, ICANN took an ill-advised step when it planned to approve the Proposed Final ABG on the same day the public comment period for the draft ended (Dec. 10th). Later, just before the meeting of the ICANN board, The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) called ICANN out in the GAC Communiqué posted on the 9th of December 2010.
The GAC stated that the board’s intent to approve a process on the same day a public comment period ends “raises questions regarding ICANN’s ability to take those comments into account.” The GAC also cited the “absence of a detailed explanation and rationale for the decisions taken to date on the new gTLD program, exemplified by the recent board decisions on vertical integration” was cause for concern and certainly an issue that needed to be resolved before the new gTLD process could continue towards completion.
The New gTLD session of the public forum ran well over its alloted time due to several passionate speakers on both sides of the issues. The general feeling we got from the public forum was that the community wants New gTLDs and the application round will be here soon.
The meeting left many new gTLD applicants wondering to what extent the program will be delayed since ICANN will need additional time to satisfy the GAC as well as ensure that it fulfills all of its obligations to the multistakeholder.
Hope for a lunch around June 2011 appears to be wishful thinking, but a launch in mid to late 2011 seem imminent. The GAC and the ICANN board plan to meet in February to iron out some issues and we could be looking at an approval of the New gTLD program around the 40th ICANN International Public Meeting scheduled in March in San Francisco.
Get your SiTE names ready, we’re on the home stretch!
[...] ICANN 39 Wrap-Up New Top-Level Domain Rules to Change Domain Industry .SiTE Application May be Filed as Early as May 2011 One Step Closer to SiTE SO Registry Announces Launch Date T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Vancouver [...]