ICANN Issues Latest Fresh gTLD Guidebook

ICANN responds to comments from first draft guidebook.

[I’m on a plane to Fresh Orleans so have had little time to review ICANN’s many documents released today. But here’s a summary.] Following receiving hundreds of comments, mostly requesting major changes or clarifications to the original draft of the fresh TLD handbook, ICANN has made a good effort to acknowledge the comments. It released a 154 page analysis of the comments received and its response to them. Among them:

Intellectual Property: ICANN proposes setting up a number of meetings and working with IP organizations to figure out if there’s a way to avoid trademark holders having to make thousands of defensive registrations.

Demand: ICANN will release a study regarding the demand for fresh TLDs soon.

Registrar/Registry separation: Registries that are affiliated with a registrar (i.e. similar ownership) cannot treat the registrar any different, and the registrar may be limited to the number of registrations of that registry’s domain names.

Annual registry fees: reduced to $25,000 per year for smaller registries

Auction proceeds: any proceeds from auctioning off TLDs would be put into a fund with specific purposes, such as managing registry failures and outreach campaigns.

Timeline: It is unlikely applications will be accepted until at least December 2009.

Registry pricing: Some sort of mechanism to keep registries from jacking up prices without justification.