RegistryASP is sponsoring the 38 ICANN meeting held in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting will run from 20 June to 25 June 2010.

This is going to be an important meeting for all organizations that are interested in the new gTLD programme. The new gTLD Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG) version 4 has already been released at the beginning of this month which is now open for public comment that will end on 21 July 2010. We could probably hope that the final version will be released later this year or early next year.

There are probably a couple of meetings that you would want to look out for if you are following the New gTLD programme. Our pick of the meetings are as follows:

1. 21 June 2010 (1530Hrs - 1730Hrs): Kurt Pritz, Senior Vice President at ICANN will brief the entire community on the status of the New gTLD program at Level 0, Gold Hall.
2. 22 June 2010 (1000Hrs - 1100Hrs): This is a session organized by the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to discuss the overarching issues within the New gTLD programme at Level 4, 400.
3. 23 June 2010 (1230Hrs - 1400Hrs): This session is meant to provide an update on Vertical Integration, a much discussed topic and is held at Level 0, Gold Hall.

About RegistryASP

RegistryASP is an leading registry backend provider that has a proven track record of operational performance and excellent customer support. RegistryASP provides registry services for .cd, .co, .hk and .sg. In addition, RegistryASP provides customised registry components for .my and policy consultation services to .om.

For more information about RegistryASP, please visit http://www.registryasp.com

This version of the DAG has important new content, for example:

• Incorporation of trademark protections, including improvements to the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS), the Trademark Clearinghouse (TM Clearinghouse), and the Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Proposal (PDDRP);
• Changes to rules for geographic TLDs, including a prohibition on country names as gTLDs;
• A new gTLD Registry transition process model, including provisions for emergency transition in the case of prolonged Registry technical outages;
• A model for providing centralized zone file access (ZFA) to aid in combating malicious conduct;
• A revised base Registry agreement, the contract future registries must sign with ICANN.

The public comment period is now open and will remain so until 21 July 2010.

Please refer to the press release at http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-31may10-en.htm for further information.

Representative Director and CEO of UrbanBrain Inc., Kevin Saimon, indicates the addition of new Internet extensions will increase competition in the market. “The extension .com was initially intended for commercial websites, .net was for organizations involved with network technologies, and .org was for non-commercial organizations. Restrictions were never upheld, lines were blurred over time, and .com prevailed as the dominant player with nearly 90 million domain registrations worldwide.”

This is only the beginning of what we may see in the future as hundreds of new extensions are proposed for the Internet.

Please refer to http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-internet-namespace-on-the-horizon-urbanbrain-announces-dotsite-site-94713549.html for the press release and http://dotsite.org for more information.

There has not been much information on this particular initiative. We will visit their booth during the ICANN meeting in Belgium and report back with some updates.

Meanwhile, please visit http://dotirish.com for more information and further updates.

About RegistryASP

RegistryASP is an leading registry backend provider that has a proven track record of operational performance and excellent customer support. RegistryASP provides registry services for .cd, .co, .hk and .sg. In addition, RegistryASP provides customised registry components for .my and policy consultation services to .om.

For more information about RegistryASP, please visit http://www.registryasp.com

“I have just checked, the website президент.рф is up and running. The Cyrillic website of the government downloads too. The websites of other state departments will have Cyrillic domains ready this month. Commercial companies will be able to use Cyrillic domain names a bit later. Russia has become the first country in the world which obtained the national domain of the top level,” President Medvedev told Pravda,  a Russian newspaper.

The Russian domain name registry has also announced that eligible registrants will be able to register domain names under .рф on 1 October 2010.

About RegistryASP

RegistryASP is an leading registry backend provider that has a proven track record of operational performance and excellent customer support. RegistryASP provides registry services for .cd, .co, .hk and .sg. In addition, RegistryASP provides customised registry components for .my and policy consultation services to .om.

For more information about RegistryASP, please visit http://www.registryasp.com

“We’re really expecting it within days. As soon as the domain is delegated it will start working, because everything is ready on our side,” Andrei Vorobyov, a spokesman for Ru-Center, a domain registrar commented.

For the full report, refer to: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/cyrillic-domains-may-start-working-this-week/405775.html

The three IDN ccTLDs are:

• Egypt: مصر (Egypt)
• Saudi Arabia: السعودية (AlSaudiah)
• United Arab Emirates: امارات (Emarat)

“All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left,” Kim Davies, Root Zone Services Manager of ICANN said.

“If your software does not have full IDN support, this might not work exactly as expected,” Davies continued. “You may see a mangled string of letters and numbers, and perhaps some percent signs or a couple of “xn--”s mixed into the address bar. Or it may not work at all.”

One of the first operational website as a result of the introduction of IDN ccTLD(s) is the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology whose domain name is وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

As of this post, ICANN has received a total of 21 requests for IDN ccTLD(s) representing 11 languages including Chinese, Russian, Tamil and Thai.

About RegistryASP

RegistryASP is an leading registry backend provider that has a proven track record of operational performance and excellent customer support. RegistryASP provides registry services for .cd, .co, .hk and .sg. In addition, RegistryASP provides customised registry components for .my and policy consultation services to .om.

For more information about RegistryASP, please visit http://www.registryasp.com

This initiative is being driven by Aras Noori, a German resident. Noori wrote to ICANN’s CEO and president Rod Beckstrom in April 2010. He advised of the Kurdish community’s decision to either apply for .KURD or .KUR.

In the letter, Noori said “a domain extension for the Kurdish people has been a dream of many communities like ZKURD , KurdITgroup , KOSC and others. We, with support of many Kurdish groups and communities are committed in making a domain extension available for Kurd people.”

Please visit http://dotkurd.org/en for more information on the proposal.

Synchronized IDN ccTLDs are described by situations listed in the Fast Track Process by ICANN where:

• IDN ccTLDs are requested in more than one official language or script in a country/territory,
• the requests for corresponding multiple strings are considered equivalent and delegation would solve a significant problem for Internet users, and
• users accessing domains under any of the equivalent IDN ccTLDs expect that such domains will resolve to the same address or value.

There are still several comments in the open Public Comment forum for the proposed plan. In addition, several independent observations and requests for clarification have been made by the technical community to ICANN. In order to address these questions, ICANN has published a set of Questions and Answers (Q&A) and is conducting two webinars. The webinars will include a presentation of the Proposed Implementation Plan and allow for questions by interested participants.

Please kindly visit http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-22mar10-en.htm for more information on the proposed plan and webinars.

“For years, MLSs and REALTOR Associations have objected to businesses referring to themselves as ‘MLSs’ in their marketing, when in fact they are not MLSs,” said Bob Bemis, interim President of the Association and CEO of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service. Under United States trademark law, the term “multiple listing service” is generic; MLSs are not allowed claim exclusive use of it. “Our goal is to create a place, the .MLS top-level domain, where the web sites actually belong to MLSs, not to other types of business,” he added.

What are the perceived benefits of this extension? According to the news release, the Association’s leaders plan for .MLS is to deliver the following benefits:

• Unique location of MLS data on the Internet. Use and effective marketing of the .MLS TLD only by MLSs will make sites at the .MLS TLD definitive sources of listings.
• Key geographical second-level domains (SLDs) will be available to MLSs. MLSs can obtain common second-level domains (SLDs) on .MLS that have long since been sold on the .COM, .NET, and .ORG TLDs. Domains like Maine.com, Texas.org, Chicago.net, etc., were long ago registered by non-MLS entities. Texas.MLS, Chicago.MLS, and all other location and plain English-word domain names will be available to MLSs as SLDs under .MLS.
• Better search engine ranking for MLS public web sites. According to some search engine optimization experts, sites at .MLS domains may receive higher rankings if consumers search for “MLS” on search engines. For example, a search for “new jersey mls” on Google would likely rank a site at “newjersey.mls” high in the results. Consumers might be more prone to select search results that have .MLS TLDs because consumers may believe they will provide more reliable information.

For more information, please refer to http://mlsdomains.org