ICANN has amended their schedule for the publication of New gTLD Objections.
Originally, it was expected that these objections would be published almost as soon as they were received by the three Dispute Resolution Service providers:
- The International Centre for Dispute Resolution.
- World Intellectual Property Organization.
- The International Center of Expertise of the International Chamber of Commerce.
ICANN’s expectation is that these objections ‘will take approximately five months to resolve in most circumstances’. Domain Resellers should be keeping a close eye on the process, as they’re going to have a huge number of TLDs to resell in the near future! Try and identify TLDs which will be useful to your client base before they're launched. That will give you the opportunity to increase awareness prior to launch.
There are a number of grounds on which an objection can be raised:
- String Confusion - when two strings are ‘confusingly’ similar.
- Legal Rights – when a string violates the legal rights of the objecting party.
- Limited Public Interest – when a string could be considered legally questionable or morally wrong by the principles of international law.
- Community Objections – when a New gTLD, which is supposed to be representing a certain community, lacks support from the community in question.
Currently published documents suggest there has only been 1 String Confusion dispute raised and 11 legal rights claims. However, we’re yet to see any publication from The International Center of Expertise of the International Chamber of Commerce regarding the number of objections they have received.
There could be a large number of objections that haven’t yet been published by these firms. By Mid-April we will be aware of all the objections that have been raised.
Strings that have had objections raised against them are likely to be delayed in terms of their delegation schedule. The first New gTLDs are expected to be delegated in Q4 2013.
Fadi Chehadé has also posted a new video on the ICANN Blog. It details some of the achievements that the New gTLD process has already accomplished and sets out a number of deadlines for the coming months. The video is shown below:
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