The 85th ICANN conference is concluding today in Mumbai, India. This is the corporation’s final meeting before the launch of the second phase of the new domains program. During the conference, ICANN representatives announced the approved schedule for the program’s second phase. It had previously been planned to begin in April. According to Domain Incite website, the organization has kept the timeline it had set for itself: the application window for new generic top-level domains will open on April 30.
Applicants will have 104 days to submit their applications, which will be accepted until August 12. The chances of obtaining a domain will not depend on whether an application is submitted on the first or the last day of the allotted period. After that, ICANN will begin a detailed review of the applications. If their number turns out to be roughly the same as during the first phase of the program in 2012 (that is, around 2,000), then Reveal Day may take place even before the start of ICANN 87, the corporation’s final conference of the year, which is scheduled to open in Muscat, the capital of Oman, on October 17.
A period will then begin that will represent the main difference between the second phase of the new domains program and the first. Applicants will have 14 days to modify their application and switch to a previously designated alternative “backup” domain. This situation may arise if an applicant realizes that it will face stiff competition or anticipates that the originally selected domain may give rise to objections.
After that, approximately in November, the date of final confirmation of applications – String Confirmation Day – will be announced. It will also start the 104-day objection period. During this time, companies and organizations may challenge applications on the basis of criteria such as intellectual property rights, public interest, and community rights. In addition, national governments and ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee may also raise objections.
The objection period is expected to end around February of the following year. By that time (likely in December), ICANN will conduct a draw determining the order in which applications will be processed, the Prioritization Draw. During the first phase of the program in 2012, this was highly important: domain zones that entered the market first gained a noticeable advantage due to heightened expectations and a wave of speculative registrations. Now that many hundreds of generic top-level domains are already present on the market, the order of launch is unlikely to be as important.
After the draw, applicants will have to wait for about another six months before learning whether they are the sole applicants for their chosen domain or whether they will face competition. This will occur after the publication of the results of the String Similarity Review, an assessment of domain similarity. However, ICANN still has to select the expert panel that will analyze this similarity and determine the criteria for its work. This is expected to be completed in the second quarter of this year.
