As tweeted by George Kirikos, the court granted ICANN’s motion to dismiss Image Online Design’s (IOD) .WEB lawsuit. ICANN posted the “Order Granting ICANN’s Motion to Dismiss Complaint” (PDF) today on their site.

IOD had applied to operate the .WEB gTLD in 2000, but ICANN did not select the TLD for the phase at the time.

The following is a guest post by Joe Alagna, GM North American Markets at CentralNic. He attended yesterday’s prioritization draw at the LAX Hilton in Los Angeles. His summary outlines the results of the lottery draw along with some important information regarding the timeline of the new gTLD process.

Yesterday, ICANN held the prioritization draw and assigned priority to each new gTLD application . The first thing I noticed as I started my day is Uniregistry’s Santa Claus milling around the hotel and wishing applicants a Merry (dot).Christmas. I think he really added to the event; it was appropriate for the season.

The event was well attended. All the largest applicants were present and interested in the drawing. We saw Donuts, Google, Uniregistry, TLDH, and others; about 300 – 400 people. The mood in the drawing room was all about “focus”. You could see that applicants were taking this seriously and that they wanted to know where they’ll stand over the next year.

The drawing began with a “glitch”. The auctioneer’s microphone stopped working and, apparently, the electricity to their systems was halted for a while. Everyone waited patiently and eventually things got started.

All applications were assigned priority numbers but the applications where drawing tickets were not purchased, were drawn last. There were 108 IDNs with tickets and 1,658 Non-IDNs with tickets to draw. So the drawing didn’t end until about 10:30 PM. The drawing proceeded in four stages:

• IDNs with tickets
• Non-IDNs with tickets
• IDNs without tickets
• Non-IDNs without tickets

The first ticket drawn was an IDN for Catholic Church in Chinese. The IDN drawing went quick. The last ticket drawn out of those that actually purchased tickets was a Donuts string, .finance. Some applicants, including Google, did not purchase tickets [for all of their applications] as part of a strategy, seemingly because they did not want priority for certain strings.

After a quiet start, where everyone listened and focused intently on what strings were being drawn, ICANN’s new gTLD Director, Christine Willett, announced that it would be OK to cheer if your string was picked. That gave the room some permission to have fun and cheering occurred but it didn’t stop the fact that there were a lot of strings to pick. The die hards hung it out, but most people went to dinner and got the results online later.

People who had uncontested strings were especially happy to get low numbers because they could get their strings in the root much earlier. I was really happy with how this turned out. Most participants felt that the drawing was done thoughtfully and fairly.

If you are an applicant, here are my estimates of the best and worst case scenarios moving forward.

The applicant’s likely situation now:

• ICANN has stated that no contracts will occur before the April 2013 ICANN meeting.
• You have passed the Administrative Checks
• You have passed the DNS Stability test (all apps have passed)
• Hopefully, you have received no Early Warnings from ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC)
• Hopefully, you have no obvious String Similarity Issues, subject to ICANN’s evaluation which should be released very soon (a recent progress report said November 2012 ?)
• Hopefully you have no obvious Geographic Name Similarities, subject to ICANN’s evaluation which should be released very soon (a recent progress report said November 2012)

Best case scenarios moving forward

• In Feb. or so, you pass Background Screening.
• In Feb. or so, you pass Registry Services Screening.
• You receive no Public Objections related to String Confusion, Legal Rights, Limited, Public Interest, or Community.
• Between March and August, you pass Financial Evaluation.
• Between March and August, you pass Technical & Operational Evaluation.
• Between March and August, you execute a contract with ICANN.
• No lawsuits are filed that extend the process.
• Between March and August, your gTLD is delegated to the root of the Internet and goes live.

Possible worst case scenarios

Worst case scenarios include the opposites of what you see above, which can either stop the application or add 12 to 18 months to the process of getting your new gTLD working. If you were able to get a low number, you could see something much closer to the Best Case Scenario and get your gTLD(s) working by the middle or end of 2013.

We have one more step in the process behind us. I wish you all the best moving forward!

• 1766 tickets were sold, 92% of applications (1920 total)
• First draw is for IDN applicants (108 out of 116 applications purchased tickets)
• Second draw for non-IDN applicants
• Third draw for the remainder of applications that did not purchase a ticket (142)

1. Kiva Microfunds
2. Invenio
3. Wikimedia Foundation

The draw has not yet commenced, apparently due to a “power outage”. Official reason is a “glitch”. For a while it appears that the audio of one of the remote participants was audible through the stream.

And here’s where to watch the ICANN new gTLD lottery draw live today – either via the embedded stream below, or you can also watch it directly on Ustream or via Adobe Connect. The draw is expected to start at 4pm EST, 1pm PST which is 21:00 UTC.

Streaming live video by Ustream

ICANN has opened their ticket sales for the lottery for new TLD applicants earlier today. Ticket sales end on December 17th at 11am PST.

Due to the lottery laws in California, the tickets have to purchased for $100 in person. Originally ICANN had proposed a digital archery system, where applicants would provide a target time and whoever clicked a link closest to their target time would be processed first, but decided to proceed with a lottery instead due to protest from the community. You can review the full ICANN rules for the lottery draw here.

The picture shown above shows the lottery ticket for Uniregistry‘s .CHRISTMAS application and was posted by Brett Fausett on Twitter.

As per an announcement from ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, Kurt Pritz, former Chief Strategy Officer at ICANN and gTLD specialist has resigned from ICANN. Until Pritz became Chief Strategy officer in October he was Vice President for Stakeholder Relations. During the new gTLD program he was the key person presenting many of the facts of the program to various stakeholders.

To the ICANN Community,

Regretfully, I have accepted the resignation of Kurt Pritz, who has served most recently as ICANN’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Kurt has submitted his resignation because of a recently identified conflict of interest, which he immediately communicated to ICANN. After analyzing this conflict of interest, we decided that a change in Kurt’s role within ICANN would be appropriate. Kurt decided to resign his position and role as an officer of ICANN, to best serve the interests of the organization. Kurt will be engaged as a subject matter expert where needed, but will have no access to new gTLD applicant information nor will he play a role in the new gTLD program.

I have already put in place a plan for the reassignment of all of Kurt’s management responsibilities.

I would like to thank Kurt for his many years of service and commitment to ICANN and our community.

Respectfully,
Fadi

Further details about the nature of the conflict of interest have not been released.

[via DomainIncite]

A Christmas gift from ICANN to new gTLD applicants? Information from today’s ICANN teleconference for new gTLD applicants.

• The new gTLD draw will take place on December 17th, 2012 (afternoon)
• Tickets for the draw have to be purchased before that date. Tickets will be for sale from December 12th to the morning of December 17th at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles.
• The draw will take place at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles as well and will be open to the public.
• Draw details to be published on November 16th, 2012.
• ICANN has obtained a license to hold a lottery in California.
• Applicants can purchase the tickets or name a proxy to purchase them for them. Applicants do not have to be present for the draw.
• Evaluation results to be expected in August 2013 (originally June 2013)
• Background screening results will be published at the same time as Initial Evaluation results.
• 6 Application withdrawals (AND, ARE, EST, CHATR, CIALIS, KSB) have been withdrawn, 7 additional withdrawals are in progress
• 0 objections have been files so far
• 169 change requests have been submitted, 29 of them were approved, 130 are in review and 10 require follow-ups
• TLD Application System (TAS) will reopen on November 26th, 2012. Applicants will have to reset their passwords.
• The first Clarifying Questions from the Geo Panel for applicants for Geographic TLDs will be issued on November 26h, 2012 via the CSC portal. Applicants will be able to respond until the end of initial evaluation.
• Other clarifying questions will be issued through TAS in January. Applicants will have four weeks to answer.
• First initial evaluation results will be released in priority order starting March 23, 2013
• Apparently it has not yet been decided that IDNs will go first.

The presentation slides have been published on the ICANN site.

Just as the 44th ICANN meeting in Prague ended yesterday, ICANN has opened  registration for the 45th ICANN meeting in Toronto, to be held Oct 14-19th 2012. Even though the site says “Prague is one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world“, I’m pretty sure it’s still in Toronto with CIRA, the .CA registry being the host.

[Hat tip to Frank Lemire for noticing the copied text on the site.]

As announced by ICANN today, the new gTLD Program Director Michael Salazar has resigned. Kurt Pritz has been appointed to take on direct oversight of the entire New Generic Top-level Domain Program in an interim capacity. He will assume the responsibilities of New gTLD Program Director in addition to his responsibilities as Senior Vice President for Stakeholder Relations. Pritz will remain in the interim role until a new Program Director is appointed.

The announcement goes on to say that “He is authorized to bring the full resources available to ICANN to bear on the application evaluation process to improve customer support, applicant communications, security and reporting.” Some applicants had pointed out that it takes ICANN more than five working days to respond to questions in the new gTLD program.

Kurt Pritz will be reporting to COO, Akram Attalah, in his new role in addition to his current responsibilities for which he reports to the CEO. In the announcement, ICANN also promises the introduction of “several new tools” that will “help applicants with any issues or questions about the evaluation process“.

This guest post was writting by Phil Corwin. Mr. Corwin is Founding Principal of the Virtualaw LLC consultancy and serves as Of Counsel to Greenberg & Lieberman and as for the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), all located in Washington, DC. This post is his personal opinion.

Expect the unexpected. Because it will happen. And it has just happened in the application phase of ICANN’s new gTLD program, with potentially profound consequences for the future of e-commerce.

During the three year period between the June 2008 ICANN Board approval of the new gTLD program and its June 2011 vote to proceed to the application stage, and even beyond then in the context of continuing GAC-Board discussions, only one competition issue ever became the subject of heated and protracted debate. And that was whether ICANN’s requirement for registry-registrar separation should be relaxed in concert with the new gTLD program, a question that ICANN eventually answered in the affirmative notwithstanding resistance from some members of the GAC.

But the consequences of that decision will hardly be a ripple across the Internet. While the consequences of what has happened could be a landscape-sweeping tsunami. And that is because the dominant search engine, Internet data aggregator, and Internet advertising provider, along with the leading online retailer, have emerged as the number two and three applicants for new gTLDs. Not just for their trademarks/brands, but for dozens of key generic terms. And, in a process that culminates in auction whenever any other non-community applicant for the same ‘string’ elects to stay in the fight, they have the bulging wallets to shove others aside and acquire their desired gTLDs. If they secure their bids the nature of Internet search and commerce could be permanently transformed in a manner far afield from the ‘competition and innovation’ mantra used to justify this massive roll of virtual dice.

The reaction has already started. In an article published in the June 14^thWashington Post just one day after ICANN’s “Big Reveal” event in London, titled “Google, Amazon lead rush to secure dot-dominance”, the perceived stakes were described:

Amazon and Google are staking claims to large swaths of the Internet under a new system for labeling Web domains, bolstering their ability to control traffic as the Web expands beyond the realms of “.com,” “.gov” and “.org.”

The bids by those companies to acquire new domain names such as “.book,” “.shop” and “.movie” renewed fears among competitors that a powerful few will dominate the Internet marketplace of the future…

If Internet users embrace the new domains, the companies that control them could bear considerable influence on Web traffic.

Amazon has applied to control the “.book” and “.movie” names, for example, meaning that anyone else selling those items would have to get the company’s permission to be listed within that domain.

The National Retail Federation had urged that oversight of such generic domain names be given to impartial entities rather than individual companies.

“The results for now are as potentially unfair to businesses and consumers as we feared they might be,” said Mallory Duncan, general counsel for the trade group…

Duncan said consumers may not realize that the new domains are under private control and that the open competition that prevails within the “.com” realm may not exist within, say, “.grocery.”

“Consumers going to that domain may not realize that all of their shopping is being done with one company instead of a competitive market,” Duncan said.

Google was among the most prolific applicants, seeking to register 101 names at an application cost of $18.7 million. Never lacking in its quest for virtual completeness, the company is seeking to control “.mom,” “.dad” and “.kid.”

Amazon applied for 76 new names, including “.amazon” and “.zappos.”…

Others, however, are bracing for the giants of the Internet to seize even more power over its commerce.

“It would be wrong on so many levels for Amazon to acquire either the ‘.book’ or ‘.author’ top-level domains,” said Paul Aiken of the Author’s Guild. “Their ambitions to extend their monopoly in bookselling have long been abundantly clear, and with their cash, their technical knowledge, this could be yet another way in which they’ve extended their control over the book market. This really makes no sense.” (Emphasis added)

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