Domain Name News – ICANN Considers .Brand Top-Level Domains

ICANN Considers .Brand Top-Level Domains – ICANN has posted a proposal to make changes to the ICANN Registry Agreement relating to “.brand” TLDs. Among the changes would be permission for the .brand registry to exclusively use a chosen registrar or registrars, rather than being required to be available through all ICANN accredited registrars. Public comments on the proposal are being sought until January 9.

Picks To Click

• Updated New gTLD contracting and delegation statistics from ICANN:
  • 190 Registry Agreements have been signed (as of 2013 December 6)
  • 34 New gTLDs have been delegated into the root zone (as of 2013 November 30)
• “Brand TLDs Become Official“, by Stéphane Van Gelder in CircleID.
• ICANN has issued advice “to IT professionals worldwide on how to proactively identify and manage private name space leakage into the public Domain Name System (DNS) and thus, eliminate the causes of name collisions as new Top Level Domains (TLDs) are added to the DNS.”
• Michael Geist has posted that the Competition Bureau of Canada is reviewing ICANN and its administration of the Domain Name System. Dr. Geist indicates that he was told the Bureau is investigating ICANN “since they are poised to adopt a system that could potentially restrict competition by providing exclusive access to new generic top level domain names.”
• Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) will take effect, for the most part, on 2014 July 1. Here are comments from Barry Sookman, Michael Geist, and Neil Schwartzman.

Timeline

• Sat, Feb 1: .net registry fee increases
• Sun, Mar 23 – Thu, Mar 27: ICANN meetings in Singapore