Changes to gTLD Application Procedures Years Away, Stakeholders Say
ICANN is right to continue discussing how to change policies and procedures related to its generic top-level domains (gTLD) program ahead of a possible second round of gTLD applications, but those discussions remain in early stages and are unlikely to substantially advance in the near term, domain name stakeholders told us in interviews. ICANN has extended to Oct. 30 the public comment period on its preliminary report on future gTLD procedures. That report, prepared in response to questions raised by the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council, urged GNSO to proceed with policy development for subsequent rounds of new gTLD rollouts (see 1510050067).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
ICANN said the comment deadline extension will allow domain name stakeholders to discuss the report during ICANN's upcoming meeting in Dublin, which is set to begin Saturday and run through Oct. 22. Stakeholders said they believe the ongoing pressure to find a compromise on proposed changes to ICANN's accountability mechanisms that are tied to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition process will occupy too much of stakeholders' interest during the Dublin meeting to make a real discussion of gTLD policy changes possible. "We have a lot of work to do in Dublin" and a final decision on changes to gTLD procedures won't be needed until a second round is read to begin, which isn't likely before 2018, said Rightside Vice President-Business and Legal Affairs Statton Hammock.
“It's going to take us some time to do a full review” of how existing gTLD procedures functioned during the first round, said Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon. The first gTLD round still hasn't ended, making it difficult at this point to collect enough data about existing results to adequately inform any process of change application and accountability rules, Hammock said. Without that data it's “hard to say what all of the policy issues might be” that require policy fixes, with a full picture of those issues unlikely to emerge until 2016 or 2017, Hammock said.
New gTLD operators are still “struggling to get fully launched” and issues surrounding the registration of two-character domain names, along with other lingering issues are “still retarding progress” in the existing application round, said former Domain Name Association Executive Director Kurt Pritz, who left the group earlier this month. “It took us more than five years to generate” the gTLD applicant guidebook that guided the first round of applications and it will take a few years to produce a revised set of rules that fully addresses the issues that participants have encountered thus far, Hammock said.
Stakeholders also remain divided over whether to push for a second application round or simply make the current round open ended, Pritz and others said. Applicants with larger portfolios are generally against a second round given that they “already have their beachfront property staked out,” while smaller applicants and firms that have sprouted to navigate ICANN's gTLD process are pushing for the second round to occur, Pritz said. Companies with an interest in brand-name applications are likely split on the need for a second round, though many feel they need to “catch up” after having missed an early start in the first round, he said. “If many brands decide they want a new TLD, that's going to be the most effective pressure for creating a new round,” Pritz said. Brand owners are likely split in part because the first gTLD round has already vastly expanded the number of TLDs available, making it “no longer viable” for any brand to register domains for every TLD, Neylon said. “We wouldn't register blacknight.shoes because it's completely irrelevant to us,” he said.
Though it remains early in the process, Pritz and others pointed to the need for procedural changes that ensure what Pritz called a “predictable, repeatable process” that ensures consistent results for the applications process and procedures for raising objections to decisions. The first-round process had been framed in a way that would require contracts to be in place before applications and was meant to ensure a “reliable process” for judging applications, Pritz said. “Instead, there were a lot of changes” after the first round began, many made at the behest of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), he said. Some stakeholders are likely to push for a clarification of GAC's role in the application process to “ensure GAC can opine on policy” prior to the start of any future rounds “but can't come back in after the fact,” Pritz said. GAC's involvement in the first round “slowed the application process way down, so that's got to be tightened up,” Hammock said.
ICANN may need to tweak existing IP rights protection mechanisms for gTLDs, though it's unclear yet how stakeholders would want to improve those mechanisms, Hammock said. That tweaking will likely include examining whether the existing protections were necessary given experiences in the first round, Neylon said. ICANN will also need to address questions about whether brands should get preference in the application process amid rising interest in gTLDs from brand owners, Hammock said. ICANN may need to address ongoing confusion about whether the same applicant can apply for singular and plural versions of the same gTLD since that's likely to remain a “big topic of discussion” in the future, Hammock said.