In a second draft of the Applicant Guidebook, published in advance of next week’s ICANN meeting in Mexico City, ICANN said it received hundreds of comments following the first draft Applicant Guidebook, and has made many changes.
ICANN’s staff has also prepared a 155-page analysis of the topics addressed. They identify four over-arching issues that require further work: trade mark protection; security and stability; malicious conduct; and demand and economic analysis.
Paul Twomey, ICANN president and CEO, said the organisation would take the time necessary to resolve these issues: “We are looking forward to meeting with the intellectual property community, the security community and all others that have an interest to work through specific suggestions for addressing their concerns in the next six to eight weeks.”
Twomey added that the further consultation would delay the launch of new gTLDs by at least six months, with the application round unlikely to open before December 2009.
This would mean that no new gTLDs would be available until well into 2010.
The second draft includes changes to the charges for new gTLDs, with a reduced annual payment, but extra charges for operators with large numbers of domains.
A third draft is now expected at the next ICANN meeting, in Sydney, Australia in June.
“I think ICANN was blown away by the comments from the IP community,” said Nick Wood of Com Laude in London. “I think they will be looking at implementable and practical mechanisms that avoid IP owners having to make defensive registrations.”
He added that the further consultation, combined with evidence of less activity among the domainer community, was a positive sign: “This has to be a good thing for the IP community.”
