ICANN’s New gTLD programme continues to develop. There have been a number of important pieces of news this week that our domain resellers may not have seen. To make things easier for you Domainbox.com are going to round up these news stories.
TheDomains.com report ‘1st Private Auction May Be Complete As Donuts Withdraws Its 1st New gTLD Application: .Vote’
Donuts, who have made a real impact on the New gTLD process and made 307 applications, have withdrawn their application for .Vote. The suggestion is that this withdrawal comes on the back of the completion of a successful auction.
The one other applicant for this string was Monolith Registry LLC, who are closely linked with Afilias, the .info registry.
The total number of withdrawn applications now stands at 72.
ICANN report that ‘NGPC Adopts Resolution Accepting Nine Items of GAC Beijing Advice on New gTLDs’
The advice given by the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) has been reviewed by the New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC).
The NGPC has chosen to accept nine pieces of the GAC advice. This is the first step in what is likely to be an on-going process in which the NGPC consults with the GAC and acts on their advice. Some of the most important pieces of advice include:
‘The NGPC directs staff that pursuant to the GAC advice and Section 3.1 of the Applicant Guidebook, Application number 1-‐1165-‐42560 for .africa will not be approved.’
‘The NGPC ... will consider whether to allow singular and plural versions of the same string.’
You can download the full list of accepted advice here.
DomainIncite.com reports that ‘Six private new gTLD auctions raise $9m’.
There have now been six private auctions for New gTLD strings which have entered contention.
The six New gTLDs involved are: ‘.club, .college, .luxury, .photography, .red, and .vote.’
This is a huge figure which highlights the interest in New gTLDs and the continuing value that these new Top Level Domains are likely to provide.
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