ICANN now says they will  be done with the Initial Evaluation for new all new gTLD applications by the end of August 2013

The statements came in a session from the ICANN Beijing meeting, entitled  “New gTLD Program Status

ICANN released some other important dates and time frames for the new gTLD process:

“ICANN will publish all objections on new gTLD applications by this Friday April 12, 2013.

We expect to receive GAC advice this week . Once published, applicants will have 21 days to submit a response to the ICANN board

After this month, possibly April 23rd, after the registry agreement is verified and approved by the ICANN board, we will begin the contracting with those applicants that have passed initial testing.

Predelegation testing is set to begin April 29th.

Once we have applicants who have gone through the contracting process, we’ll be looking at beginning predelegation testing with them. and then you see a variety of additional times — milestones here.

Our sunrise and claims system for the trademark clearinghouse going live by end of June, beginning of July of this year.

We have the URS systems anticipated to be operational in July and August, and then the string contention procedures, the resolution procedures, community priority evaluation and auctions beginning as early as September and we anticipate extended evaluation beginning in October.

We could begin contracting with applicants as early as April 23rd

Applications that would be eligible for contracting are those which pass initial evaluation, which do not have any pending objections or GAC advice, and are not in string contention.