The board resolved on Friday to dedicate its two-day retreat in September entirely to working on the issues that remain outstanding in the Draft Applicant Guidebook. The current version of the DAG, the fourth, is expected to be the final draft before applications become open to potentially hundreds of prospective new TLD registry operators.
ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said the final Applicant Guidebook could be ready or almost ready for approval as early as December this year, when the ICANN community will meet in Cartagena, Colombia. Companies wishing to apply for their ".brand" TLD in the first round could find themselves able to do so in the first half of next year and should start their planning process now if they have not already.
However, because ICANN is a bottom-up policy-making organization, there are still issues that the community needs to resolve before the board can act. The procedures for providing intellectual property protection to trademark holders have almost been finalized, and the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee has been asked for further guidance on how to handle its concerns about "morality and public order" in new TLDs. Registries and registrars are also continuing to make progress towards a consensus view on cross-ownership and vertical integration.
One key element of the new TLD process is the requirement that all new TLDs incorporate DNSSEC at launch. DNSSEC took another significant step forward at this meeting with the signing of http://www.isoc.org/ as the first second level .ORG to be secured by this new security protocol. The .org TLD is the largest TLD to date to deploy DNSSEC at the zone level; and the http://www.isoc.org/ signing paves the way for EVERY .ORG to be secured via DNSSEC.
There was also good news in Brussels for the world's over one billion Chinese speakers, as the ICANN
Board voted to approve three Chinese-script internationalized domain names for addition to the root. The country-code managers for China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, who received standing ovations following the Board's decision, will soon be able to distribute addresses ending in their IDN scripts. These TLDs will join several other country-specific strings that were applied for in the "fast -track" process approved at the Nairobi meeting.
