The ICANN Ombudsman Chris LaHatte, issued a report today on a complaint by Sophia Bekele on behalf of DotAfrica, alleging a conflict of interest on 2 members of the ICANN Board, finding no conflict existed. "The essence of the complaint is a complaint about a conflict of interest with members of the ICANN board in considering issues about new gTLDs applications. This was first raised by … [Read more...]
Fairwinds Study: 74% Of Internet Users Are Entirely Unaware of New gTLD Program: 44% Says It Will Cause Confusion
Fairwinds Partners just published a white paper on the new gTLD's entitled "2013: The Year of the Address Bar" including results from a survey of 2,008 Internet users between the ages of 13 and 64 about their awareness of and attitudes toward new gTLDs "2013 will be the year that Internet users wake up to the world of Internet addresses and start thinking more about what they put into their … [Read more...]
.Glean Becomes 7th Officially Withdrawn New gTLD Application
ICANN has just posted a 7th withdrawn application on its website. The application for .Glean filed by Lifestyle Domain Holdings, Inc. of Knoxville Tn has been formally withdrawn and now reflected on ICANN's website. The owner of Lifestyle Domain Holdings, Inc. appears to be Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. Lifestyle Domain Holdings, Inc still has 12 active new gTLD applications … [Read more...]
If Your In Contention For a New gTLD Your Draw Number Is Only As Good As The Worst Number Picked By A Competing Applicant
As the ICANN draw of December 17th is less than two weeks away, one issue that has been debated on Facebook is the importance of the draw for those new gTLD's strings in contention. Today ICANN settled one issue giving IDN applications preference, but not giving preference to any other applicant including Geographic applicants which had lobbied ICANN for priority as well. So now with all … [Read more...]
Which Would You Rather Have, A Left of The Dot .Christmas Sub Domains Or A Right Of The Dot gTLD .Christmas Domain?
Yesterday Left of the Dot, the company that took over management of Christmas.com in October, rolled out free sub-domains called Christmas Family Pages. Christmas Family Pages "are free for families and allow for real-time sharing of photos, recipes, Christmas traditions, wish lists, and memories. "Every family who creates an account gets their own part of Christmas.com (e.g., … [Read more...]
After Over 1 Million Submissions, Enom Releases The 5 Most Requested new gTLD Extensions & Categories
eNom, Inc., a top 5 ICANN accredited registrar, has been taking "expressions of interest" in new gTLD domain names from consumers since June. eNom has received over one million submissions worldwide. The top five new gTLD domain extensions people are most interested in are: 1) .Web 2) .Shop 3) .Hotel 4) .Family 5) .Tech There are 9 applicants … [Read more...]
ICANN Opens Up Comment Period On “Strawman” Rights Protections For New gTLD’s
ICANN just opened up the comment period on a the IPC/BC proposal for Improvements and Enhancements to the RPMs for new gTLDs [PDF, 68 KB]. Out of discussions evaluating the merits of these recommendations, the group produced at a strawman solution to address the concerns of affected stakeholders. This strawman solution is being posted for public comment. Here are the points of the … [Read more...]