Reviewing the GAC early warnings issued last night some winners really stick out.
New gTLD applications that were generally thought would get a GAC early warning, but did not include .gay, .sex, .adult, and .porn.
Another clear winner out of the GAC early warnings was Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry that applied for 54 new gTLD’s and did not receive even one early warning.
The DotGreen came out a double winner as their application did not get a early warning, but all other applications for the new gTLD .green did receive an early warning.
There was not an early warning issued for a potential competitor of .green, .Eco.
Other winners include gambling domains which many thought would receive an objection including .poker, .bet, although .casino got 4 early warning objections.
On the losers front there were a lot of objections to professional new gTLD’s that are planned to be made available to anyone to register including .attorney, .lawyer, .health, .accountant, .accountants, .cpa, .dentist, .doctor. and .engineering
Other losers include financials and insurance verticals including; .insurance, .carinsurance, .bank, .loan, .loans, .insure, .investments, .finance, .financial, .credit and .creditcard.
However .law and .esq did not get an objection.
Generic new gTLD applications got hit pretty hard including Amazon which got hit with early warnings for .app. .book. .cloud, .blog, .game, .mail, map, .mobile, .movie, .news, .search, .shop, .show, .tune, .video, .song,. Google got hit with an early warning on some of those strings as well
Other generic getting an early waring included closed applications for .baby, .makeup, .rugby., gmbo, .hotel., hotels, .website.
While there was no early warning on .site, .inc or .llc
There were no early warnings for .web.
I think the list of ‘losers’ with regards to GAC Early Warnings can include Donuts. As I go through each warning from Heather Dryden, GAC Chair and Australian Representative and far and away the most active issuer of Early Warnings, I have noted that every single Donuts application that refers to a profession or “regulated market sector”has been warned. This was not done uniformly, in that other applicants for the very same TLDs were not warned. Donuts was singled out as a bad egg in contention sets such as .cpa, .doctor, and .insurance.
Ms. Dryden notes that Donuts does not enumerate sufficient safety measures and protections against public harm and confusion. What may have initially seemed like the GAC Chair going overboard to me now shows that she was perhaps the most meticulous reader from within the GAC. I think she deserves kudos for leading the GAC and doing all of her homework, regardless of whether you agree with her decisions or not
Donuts is clearly paying for the fact that every one of their applications was identical and they did not take the time to address the nuances of the target market for each TLD. They skipped out on some pre-deadline work but are making up for it on this end. With that said, I don’t think we can label them as ‘losers’ for long as they will surely address each application issue and nullify these warnings.
Good points Andrew.
I think the pivotal issue now is to what length can applications be changed in a ‘remediation’ process to accommodate the GAC?
Is adding additional safeguards for professions allowed? If so, then Donuts should be able to overcome this, unless those safeguards make their model unworkable.
Will Amazon be able to rescind their request for exemption from the Code of Conduct in the case of their closed generic word tlds? If not, then they are pretty big losers here too.
Maybe the biggest question, Will the Board even care? Some suggest that the Board will approve many if not all of these regardless of GAC warning or advice. Ultimately, they have the final word.
It’s going to be interesting to see how many apps drop out and request refund as a result of the GAC early warnings.
and of course even though an application didn’t get a GAC early warning the GAC can still object to it later
http://www.thedomains.com/2012/11/24/just-because-your-gtld-application-escaped-gac-early-warning-it-doesnt-mean-the-gac-wont-object-to-it/