See What .SiTE is Sharing!
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The meeting proved to be vital to New gTLD applicants due to a special meeting of the ICANN board on June 20th where ICANN voted to approve the New gTLD Guidebook (noting that a few minimal changes are still in order and officially kicking off the New gTLD world wide communications campaign.
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Many consider .XXX a precursor to the New gTLD program due to the timing of the recent approval of the application. The triple-x domain name is a very sensitive domain extension that has been heavily scrutinized by many in the Internet community as well as leaders in the community for which it is proposed to serve. But after 7 years of waiting in line, ICM Registry, the registry operator for .XXX, finally made it through the ICANN process.
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Very serious. 
Last week’s ICANN meeting was much different than any other ICANN meeting the .SiTE team has attended in the past. After attacking several issues of disagreement brought forth by the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) in Brussels on Feb. 28th through March 2nd, the ICANN Board and the GAC resumed their consultations on tough New gTLD / .XXX related issues in San Francisco at the 40th Public International ICANN Meeting.
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Members of our .SiTE team were in attendance at the fifth annual DOMAINfest event held in Santa Monica Last week (Feb. 1st – 3rd), where a record number of attendees (715) from all over the world gathered to share ideas on buying/selling domains, monetization strategies, SEO and traffic optimization, trends in the industry, and yes, even New gTLDs. Here is a short list of things that left an impression on us.
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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.
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In a bold and unexpected move, the overseer of the Internets name space, ICANN has voted to allow co-ownership between registries (the entities that run Top-Level Domains) and registrars (the entities that sell domain names to end-users.)
The issue of Registry/Registry separation has been ongoing since before ICANN first announced that it would open up the Internet to New Top Level Domains, like SiTE. In 2007, members of the community expressed concern over the issue and ICANN commissioned a study to be carried out by the research firm CRA International. The CRA Report was published in October 2008 and set the stage for two years of debate, four revisions of the New gTLD Draft Applicant Guidebook, and several thousand email exchanges in a Policy Development Working group before the ICANN Board took matters into its own hands. In a matter of eight months, or a little more than 230 days, the ICANN board did an one-eighty on its original decision requiring strict separation.
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The Special Meeting of the ICANN Board of Directors which took place Thursday, October 28th (10/29/2010 JST) has prescribed just what many new gTLD applicants such as .SiTE have needed.
The ICANN board passed a resolution which aims at starting the New gTLD Application round on May 30th, 2011. According to the resolution, the issues of Vertical Integration, Recommendation 6 Objection Process, and Geographic names have yet to be resolved.
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The minutes from the recent ICANN Board Retreat were made available today. The retreat, which took place in Trondheim, Norway this past Thursday and Friday, was a closed meeting of the Board in which they focused several remaining key New gTLD issues. ICANN Chariman, Peter Dengate Thrush, said that progress had been made in the process for creating the New gTLD Program and that several additional reports had been requested. The Chariman of the Board also indicated that a modified version of the Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG) was also requested. The forthcoming version of the DAG, as well as the additional reports are expected to be released sometime before ICANN 39 in Cartagena, Columbia early this December.
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The Registry operator for the ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) for the Republic of Somalia, .so (dot SO) has announced a launch date to begin registrations. According to the SO Registry, the ccTLD was re-delegated to the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications this past April by ICANN. We first caught a glimpse of the SO Registry at the ICANN International meeting which was held in Brussels, Belgium this past June when GMO Registry promoted the extension.
The SO Registry announced, rather quietly, that it will begin registrations in the name space on November 1st 2010. The launch model will follow the standard protocol; commencing with a “Sunrise” period — a trademark claims period in which trademark holders can claim first rights to their trademarked names. Applications during this 30 day period with multiple legitimate contenders will go to auction.
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The dotSiTE crew recently attended the TRAFFIC Domain Conference and Expo held in Vancouver, Canada (June 8th – 10th). Information about the TRAFFIC event can be found here.
Briefly, the TRAFFIC Domain Conference and Expo presents an opportunity for domain name investors to get together to buy and sell domain names, discuss industry best practices, and share ideas and opinions on the future of the industry.
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