Month: November 2012

GAC Early Warnings Issued

Posted on by jbourne

As promised, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) filed its Early Warnings on individual applications for new gTLDs on November 20.  The 242 Early Warnings can be found here.

As outlined in the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook (Section 1.1.2.4), the GAC can use Early Warnings to send a notice that an application may be regarded as potentially sensitive or problematic to certain governments or that the application could violate national laws. These Warnings are only notices and not formal objections, and as ICANN stated when it filed the Warnings, the Early Warnings “mainly consist of requests for information, or requests for clarity on certain aspects of an application.” Continue reading “GAC Early Warnings Issued”

Nets Loss – Part II

Posted on by jbourne

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the domain name Nets.com redirecting to a page taunting the Brooklyn Nets and owner Mikhail Prokhorov and subsequently, the Dallas Mavericks homepage. Some people suspected that the prank was the work of Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who has feuded with Prokhorov in the past, but that theory could be dispelled by a new Nets.com development, reported by the New York Post.

Today, if you type Nets.com into your browser, you will find yourself on the NBA homepage of another New York team: the New York Knicks. This new redirect provides more questions than answers. If Cuban really were behind the page, why would he promote an NBA team that isn’t his own, or is there a third party who just likes to mess with Prokhorov and the Nets?

WHOIS data for the site has not changed since October, and it is still registered to Cyber Mesa Computer Systems in New Mexico, the company that has owned the domain name since 1994. One would guess that the same person is behind all of the different redirects, due to their generally similar nature, but it’s impossible to know for sure.

Regardless, the same takeaway as before remains true. The loser here is the Nets franchise, which is being repeatedly pranked on a domain name that it should own. Of course, now that the season has started, the real NBA action is on the court, but it will be interesting to see how this domain name drama plays out online.

Lessons from an Unlikely Place

Posted on by jbourne

We largely focus on brand owners here on the gTLD Strategy blog – how brand owners will be affected by new gTLDs, how those brand owners that applied for new gTLDs can effectively integrate them into their digital strategies, etc. But all told, strategic companies were only a portion of the total pool of new gTLD applicants. By FairWinds’ calculations, approximately one-third of all new gTLDs applied for were brand names. When you strip out the duplicates, brand names make up about half of the total group of potential future gTLD strings. Continue reading “Lessons from an Unlikely Place”

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Posted on by jbourne

UPDATE: ICANN has just posted the presentation for today’s webinar. In those slides, ICANN states that the Prioritization Drawing will take place on December 17 at the Hilton LAX is Los Angeles, CA. The sale of the tickets required for the Drawing will take place from December 12 through 16 and on the morning of December 17, also at the Hilton LAX. ICANN is encouraging applicants to purchase their tickets before the drawing date.

There is also a slight change to the timing for Clarifying Questions (CQs). CQs about geographic-term gTLDs will be issued on November 26 as planned, but all other CQs will be issued in January. Applicants will have four weeks to respond, instead of two as ICANN had previously stated.

Continue reading “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”