Expression of Interest proposal sent to ICANN

At the last ICANN meeting in Seoul, South Korea last month, the ICANN board agreed to a porposal from a group led by Mind+Machines’ Jothan Frakes that suggested to launch a call for Expression of Interest in new top level domains, like .sport. As is usual, ICANN submitted the proposal to public comments.

The whole process of drafting the final request for proposals have been going on for years. At the same time, potential applicants and their communities are getting nervous that it gives the impression that nothing moves ahead. This may not be true, because there are some very complicated issues that still need to be resolved. At the same time, it poses problems.

For ICANN, the main issue is to quantify the number of proposals that can be expected. If it needs to hire staff and experts to evaluate these proposals, it needs to know how many proposals will be submitted.

For applicants like us, we need to send out clear signals to our communities that we are serious, in order to be able to raise the necessary funding to apply for our TLD later on. We also need to know if there are going to be similar proposals submitted by other groups. This will give us a chance to settle our differences and submit one proposal, rather than several.

This is why we joined a working group that has submitted a proposal to ICANN, asking for them to launch a call for Expression of Interest in applying for a new top level domain. This proposal suggests among others to:

• ask for a deposit, in order to avoid frivolous submissions. The deposit would then be deducted from the application fee later on.

• Only allow applications coming from the groups that have formally expressed their interest. This will force all the potential applicants that have not yet made their interest public to come out of the woods.

• Publish the results of the call, so that groups can form alliances ahead of the application window.

Overall, we think the proposal of this working group is balanced and we hope it will be accepted by the ICANN board at its 20^th December meeting.

The ICANN Seoul meeting is now over, and our team came with some good news and no so good ones.
The not so good news is that the ICANN staff does not commit to any timeline for the introduction of new top level domains. The previous information saying that applications for new top level domains like .sport [...]

ICANN has published today the third draft of the Applicant's Guidebook for new Top Level Domains.
This is a huge pile of information that will require several days to digest.  At first sight, the current version does not change a lot with regard to community-based TLDs like our .sport proposal. There are sitll concerns in [...]

The new DotSport Logo has arrived. We hope you will like it.

Please sign the Petition to support .SPORT !

The DotSport Domain Name Registry is proud to announce it went one step further in providing the best technology for the sport community. 
The DotSport web site is now supporting IPv6 and DNS Decurity Extensions (DNSSEC).
IPv6 is required for the future growth of the Internet. It is expected that in three or four years time, new [...]

The Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a hearing titled, "Oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)" on Thursday, June 4, 2009.
In his testimony before the Congress, Dr. Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN, highlighted the strong interest of the Internet community for new Generic Top Level Domains. Along those [...]

Luxembourg, Luxembourg and Mexico City, Mexico – 02 March 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The DotSport consortium announced today that his founder, Patrick Vande Walle, has been appointed to the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
The Security and Stability Advisory Committee advises the ICANN community and Board on matters [...]

ICANN today published a revised version of the gTLD applicant's guide. This document will be further discussed at the ICANN Mexico meeting at the beginning of March.
Some issues regarding trademark protection, security and stability have not been addressed yet in this version.
It is anticipated that a final version will be published this summer and that [...]

As the .Sport community grows, we thought it would be interesting to have a Facebook page where we could post quick updates about .Sport.
And remember, .Sport is also on Twitter and Identi.ca !