via singapore.41.icann.org

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.

The expansion of gTLDs will bring a lot of change to the Internet. Soon, users will have a broad range of extensions to choose from when creating a site or online presence. Brands will be able to control their entire namespace and dramatically improve their overall online presence. Smaller companies can expand their online presence by registering there full company name under TLDs that offer them the best visibility to customers in a particular industry or local.

Many domains will be around to choose from and we hope .SiTE fits within your development plans.

According to ICANN the next step on the checklist to allow XXX to become operational was the signing of the Registry Agreement with ICANN. Check. This was completed on April 1st and was accompanied by a well thought out post on the ICANN blog by ICANN General Counsel & Secretary, John Jeffrey.

The next item on the list is the actual delegation of .XXX to the root zone. After the delegation, the implementation schedule will be up to ICM Registry. If you’ve got one of the five hundred thousand preregistered names, your wait is almost over.

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.

VeriSign's Chuck Gomes Addresses the ICANN Board at the 40th ICANN International Public Meeting

All while wresting with the issues related to ICM Registry’s proposed top-level domain, .XXX, the board has been charged with implementing a timely launch of the New gTLD program. Though the triple-x top gTLD proposal has been going through the ICANN process for some time now it has often been tied closely with the current New gTLD program.

The ICANN board put its foot down last Friday at the Regular Meeting of the ICANN Board held in San Francisco, California. By a vote of 9 to 3 the Board voted to move forward with the contract for .XXX, the highly controversial, made-for-adult-content-only top-level domain. The board also adopted a working timeline for completion of the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook. The outcome of the ICANN Board meeting sent a message; ICANN wants New gTLDs, and they want them NOW.

Presentation: Internet Vital Signs

Eli Goodman of comScore captivated the audience with his presentation “Internet Vital Signs.”  The presentation focused on three important topics; search, mobile, and e-commerce.  Here are a few quick snippets from the presentation:

• The U.S. now only accounts for 14% of the total Internet population
• U.S. search saw a 23% year over year growth with medium and light users using search more and more often
• 77% of mobile users still do not make online purchase from their phones
• Groupon experienced 657% year over year growth
• Only 5% of those recently surveyed say they were influenced by social media to purchase a particular product

Presentation: State of the Industry: 2011 and Beyond

Jeff Kupietzky, CEO and President of Oversee.net presented his top 10 predictions for 2011 during is presentation “State of the Industry: 2011 and Beyond.” Jeff predicts several domain sales will be in excess of 5 million dollars as brands look to own category domain names such as; Books.com (Barns and Noble), Baby.com (Johnson & Johnson) and Loans.com (Bank of America).

Keynote: Luck & Perspective by Bob Parsons

Go Daddy Founder and CEO, Bob Parsons gave the Keynote presentation at this years DOMAINfest.  His presentation, “Luck & Perspective” took the audience on his entrepreneurial journey of taking big risks that paid off, and his will to persevere through the tough times.

Panel: Opportunities in ccTLDs, IDNs, and New gTLDs

Panelist Adrian Kinderis of AusRegistry International let those few attendees of the session know that it was unacceptable that the room was only half full as this topic impacts everybody.

Panelists suggested that consumers would easily adapt to New gTLDs and get accustomed to seeing brand names on the right side of the dot (for example, .microsoft). Further, New gTLDs presented great benefits for domainers because they can go out and own a whole category, such as .law, and have complete control over the space.

Panel: Buying and Selling Domains

The big take-away from this session was that the experts strongly believe that there is still a strong potential for new-comers and a lot of new growth yet to come.

Michael Berkens, discussed the opportunity for investment in running a New gTLD registry, and reiterated a point from the New gTLD session the previous day, stating that New gTLDs will give investers a chance to play from the other side of the field.  Though the potential is huge for speculative investment in New gTLD second-level registrations, .com/.net/.org will not be affected because they have reached a high level of stability.

Fireside Chat with Ben Mezrich, Author of “The Accidental Billionaires”

One of the most impressionable moments of the event was the fireside chat with the writer of the book which the movie, The Social Network was based on.  The author, Ben Mezrich, was interview by Oversee.net President and CEO, Jeff Kupietzky.  Ben gave an extraordinarily captivating account of his journey writing the book and captivated the audience with his story.

This fireside chat with Ben Mezrich along with Bob Parsons Keynote, and the great information provided by the expert panels made this three day event well worth the flight over the Pacific worth it. We’ll see you next year!

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!

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.

The announcement states that no formal rules for separation existed and the board “opted not to create new rules prohibiting registrars from applying for or operating New gTLD registries. Chairman of the ICANN Board, Peter Dengate Thrush explained, “the Board saw no rationale for placing restrictions on cross-ownership.”

This move has enormous implications for the domain industry. The minutes from the board meeting that produced the recent announcement indicate that current registries will be able to move to the new system.  This means that VeriSign and any other registries will be able to directly sell their extensions to end users, providing no anti-competitive strategies are empolyed.  Also, smaller TLDs proposed for specific communities can put themselves in a better position to service their communities, and brands looking to apply for their own brand TLD will be able to smoothly operate their own .brand extensions without the use of a third-party.

This new model will invite more competition due to the significantly reduced barriers to entry.  Several of the larger registries will apply for their own New gTLD strings or invest in other projects to help continue the growth of their business. Stakeholders in .SiTE can now become ICANN Accredited Registrars and sell .SiTE registrations directly to end users to create wider distribution channels.

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.

The timeline shows that the proposed Final Applicant Guidebook (AGB) is targeted to be published for public comment on November 9th, and the board hopes to approve the Final AGB at its Regular Meeting of the ICANN Board in Cartagena, Columbia following the conclusion of the 39th ICANN International Public Meeting.

If all goes well with the Final AGB, we are looking at a four-month communication campaign leading up to the official launch of the application process on May 30th, 2011.

The schedule seems tight, and there are still some tall hurdles to clear. Without a clear resolution on the V.I. issue, many would-be applicants are still left with some level of uncertainty. The Final AGB, which is due to be published in less than a week from today, should give us a good idea of where the process stands, and just how certain the May 2011 lunch is.

We’ll be in attendance at ICANN’s 39th International Public Meeting in Cartagena next month and we’ll keep everyone informed on the latest developments.