Will lose big if Verisign doesn’t get its way — IDN.com owners
They could be forced to buy transliterations within a limited time period.
Verisign has been negotiating its contracts for transliterations of .com for a long time, and the prior week we got an idea regarding what the hold up is.
ICM Registry, the domain registry for .xxx and the forthcoming .adult, .porn and .sex top level domains, disclosed that it finally inked contracts with ICANN for fresh TLDs. The catch is that ICM had to change how it handled its Domain Matching program.
ICM wanted to reserve second level domain names that match existing .xxx domain names, and then offer the reserved names to the .xxx owner if (and whenever) they decide they want the fresh domains. The idea is similar to what .UK is doing for owners of third level .uk domains. In that case, third level owners have five years to claim their second level domains.
But ICANN wouldn’t let them do it this way, as stated by ICM. There are two issues at play, as I understand it.
The modest issue is that ICANN demands that domains not be held back from sunrise. This probably isn’t a big deal, as few generic domains will be captured in sunrise.
The bigger issue is that ICANN won’t let ICM “hold on the shelf” the matching domains in perpetuity. This is why it is now giving .xxx owners only a limited amount of time to register the matching domain. They’ll have to come up with a lot of cash to get the matches, rather than waiting until they want to use the domains to pull the trigger.
If Verisign is forced to do the same thing, this won’t be pretty for people who have waited patiently for the introduction of .com transliterations.
They by now own IDN .com, and Verisign told them they would be able to get the matching IDN .com-as-IDN when they came out. The plan was to not force IDN.com owners to buy the matching IDN.IDN within a set time period.
That might be in jeopardy now. IDN.com owners might end up having a limited window in which to buy the matching domain.
Of course, this isn’t set in stone yet. Verisign is still negotiating with whatever leverage it can find. That might be minimal, given its tenuous relationship with ICANN.
I can imagine some creative solutions for Verisign to run the program in a way that meets its stated objectives, but they’re all messy and expensive.
