ICANN Board Approval Opens Internet To Many New Domains

By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch

The Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today approved the Applicant Guidebook for new generic top-level domains, opening the door to potentially hundreds of new internet domains, like .africa, .music, .gay or .nyc.

The Board resolution is available here.

After six years of sometimes heated discussions, ICANN will now accept applications for a first round of new TLDs between 12 January 2012 and 12 April 2012. Evaluation results would be published in November 2012 and the first, i.e., uncontroversial, TLDs could go to the internet root in early 2013 after concluding contractual negotiations with ICANN. There are currently 22 domain name endings on the internet, such as .com, .net and .org, according to ICANN.

While participants gathered at the 41st ICANN meeting in Singapore applauded and potential new registry sponsors and providers rushed to put out positive press releases, representatives of several governments had tried to once more put brakes on the process, arguing for what they said would be better solutions to trademark protection and antitrust rules.

European Commission representative Gerard de Graaf in a session Sunday on the eve of the Board’s vote aggressively pushed for further changes in the guidebook. Both the Commission and the US National Telecommunications and Information Agency in the days before the meeting sent similar letters with their concerns regarding vertical integration leading to allegation that it was a concerted move.

For letter, see here.

Outgoing ICANN Board Chair Peter Dengate Thrush told Intellectual Property Watch during the press conference that in the end, the question was whether one wanted “to hold up this enormous tide of enthusiasm, this demand coming from the community to make things marginally better.”

The Board, he said, clearly had come to the majority view that “enough was enough“ and that the program was good enough to launch. Experts like internet engineer and ICANN Board member Steve Crocker – who Dengate Thrush said was considered “if not as a father then at least as an uncle of the internet” – had concluded that the program was solid.

The vote was 13 in favour and one opposed (with two abstentions).