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ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, will be addressing Domain Forum in Sofia, Bulgaria tomorrow.
The event, which runs for one day, will feature a broad selection of international domain name industry experts who have gathered in Sofia to talk about ICANN’s new TLD initiative.
Full details of the event may be found here.
This is the vote from the ICANN board on new TLDs a few weeks ago in Singapore:
At the ICANN board meeting last week a single line resolution related to the new TLD launch gave a very clear indication of a timeline:
RESOLVED (2010.10.28.17), the Board directs staff to adopt as a working plan the Launch Scenario with launch date of Q2 2011, as contained in the graphic attached here [PDF, 112 KB].
The graphic gives May 30th 2011 as the launch date:
ICANN board newtld guideline October 2010
So will this timeline be respected?
It looks like the ICANN board has had enough of the delays and is making a push for this date.
Expect more news on this around the time of the meeting in Cartagena in December.
Last week ICANN held its 38th public meeting in the centre of Brussels, Belgium.
While the new TLD project was a topic up for discussion it might not have been “the” topic last week.
In any case nothing definitive about new TLDs was decided in Brussels.
ICANN’s board will be meeting again in September to try to “put to bed” some of the outstanding issues, but whether they’ll be able to pull it off or not remains to be seen.
ICANN has published an updated set of documents in relation to the launch of new top level domains.
The “Draft Application Guidebook” which is now in its 4th iteration is aimed at prospective operators of new domain extensions and covers a wide range of topics in relation to applying for, launching and running a new domain extension.
Not everyone speaks English.
Not everyone writes using Latin characters.
Unfortunately up until a couple of days ago there was no way to have a domain name 100% in a character set other than Latin. Sure, you could get special characters in the domain, but not in the extension ie. the part on the left of the “.” could use special characters, but the bit on the right couldn’t. So you could register a .com or a .eu with special characters in it, but the actual domain extension was still in ASCII.
ICANN has announced that the first non-Latin domain extensions are now online. You can read more about it on the ICANN blog
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ICANN has stated that it is “on track” with its new TLD plans, but if you were hoping to register something like .film or .blog anytime soon you would be disappointed.
The current situation is that the project is moving forward, but there are no clearly defined timelines.
At an educated guess predicting that registrations could open in 2012 might not be unreasonable, but it is NOT a “given”.
Antony Van Couvering from Minds and Machines has published a revised timeline based on the current “state of play”. It’s not fixed or “set in stone”, but it’s probably as accurate a timeline as anyone could produce in the current circumstances.
Antony’s timeline predicts an application round for companies wanting to run a new domain space (extension) in Q2 of 2011. Applications in that round would need to be evaluated etc., so you’d expect the process to last through until Q4 of 2011, with the public being able to actually get domains in Q1 of 2012.
It would be nice to see this kind of timeline coming into being, but I strongly suspect that each of the various stages will be longer than anyone can currently predict (based on how slow the process has been to date).
You can read Antony’s article here or check out the timeline image below (click to enlarge):
What do you think?
Minds and Machines have launched a new site targetted at prospective candidates for “city TLDs”.
The site provides information on what they predict will be the application process for a city that wants to run their own domain space.
While the site is obviously going to push the Minds and Machines‘ services to some extent it’s still a pretty good source of information for city managers or people who are interested in understanding how the process may work.
Those involved with new TLD projects have been waiting “in the wings” for the last couple of months, as it was very unclear how ICANN intended to move forward
After the meeting in Seoul ICANN seem to have found a way of moving forward, though we will have to wait and see exactly how that pans out.
As new TLD projects come out of hiding we’ll try to keep you up to date
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ICANN is organising a “public outreach” meeting in Abu Dhabi on August 4th.