In its new updated timeline ICANN under the date of November 30, 2012 says:
“”In the ideal case, an application that has encountered no problems has passed evaluation by this date.
“The applied-for string can begin a transition that will result in being delegated into the root zone, and eventually the string will be live and reachable on the Internet as a TLD. ”
“However, some applications will be subject to special processes depending on the circumstances. For example, if more than one party has applied to operate the same TLD (a circumstance referred to as string contention), attempts to resolve the contention begin.”
“As you can see, the New gTLD Program forecasts a busy 2012.”
“Some new gTLDs will clear the process late in the year, and be ready for delegation in early 2013.”
“Other new gTLDs will have a longer path.”
You can read the ICANN announcement with the new gTLD time frame here
This is interesting:
’12 November: Results of Initial Evaluation
.. Some results may be posted earlier than this date. ‘
Perhaps we will see some TLDs fast-track through.
.post?
i.e., applications they’ve been sitting on for 10 years
perhaps they’re trying to do a little steve jobs reality distortion here. approve a few non-controversial applications right away to make it seem like the program is moving forward.
but the reality of making money from defensive registrations is not going away.
even though some of the most reliable spam filters are based on ip addresses, and even though mail worked fine before “domain names”, and still does, having only an ip address may not be not sufficient to reliably send mail these days. because the email monopoly keeps creating ways to do filtering based on what’s in dns records. icann dns records. and the monopoly email providers tend to use these silly dns-based filters. so if you don’t register a domain name in the icann dns, it seems you can’t reliably send email through the systems of these big providers. such mail might get flagged simply because you don’t have an icann dns domain name. maybe this is not an intentional result, but it is absurd. email software still accepts ip addresses, but these people dreaming up dns-based filters are killing that basic, sensible functionality.
(not suggesting that email itself is reliable. it’s so ridiculously open for abuse that it can’t be truly relied on. it’s 1% signal and 99% noise.)
if i’m not mistaken the person who’s heading the icann board these days is someone who makes their living from email services.
what do email services have to do with the first new gtld’s to be approved? maybe .post will show us.
Looks like next years Super Bowl will be the hayday for new tld ads. Can you imagine what it may be like? Just another money making haul for the Tv networks and the NFL.
My hunch for fast tracked tlds would be major city tlds. They have low probability of conflict/contention and I think they have good potential for positive PR for the program as a whole.
I still believe they’re going to lose their shirt. It will take decades to change the behavior of the public, habituated to typing in dot com on everything.