US Court halts .Africa delegation until a preliminary injunction case by applicant DotConnectAfrica is determined

on March 05, 2013, a UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA – WESTERN  DIVISION ruling has granted an Interim Relief for DotConnectAfrica by issuing a decision below that ICANN should hold off from delegating the .AFRICA top-level domain (TLD) for ZA Central Registry (ZACR). The Court ruled. DCA Trust has taken ICANN to task …

DCA Trust’s Precedential Win over ICANN, .AFRICA the most important case of the gTLD Program

dubious After ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) issued “consensus advice” objecting to DCA Trust’s application, ICANN’s Board summarily awarded the .AFRICA domain to the African Union Commission, DCA Trust’s competitor. DotConnectAfrica in turn refused to back down and accept the Boards recommendation that it should withdraw its application and instead invoked the last accountability mechanism …

ICANN New gTLD Program Committee votes to halt .Amazon

ICANN published last night the minutes of the New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) which following numerous GAC advice and voted down Amazon’s Application for .Amazon. Here is the resolution: “”Whereas, the GAC met during the ICANN 47 meeting in Durban and issued a Communiqué on 18 July 2013 (“Durban Communiqué”). Whereas, the GAC advised the …

NGPC Accepts GAC Category 1 and 2 Safeguard Advice

ICANN New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) has finally given its safeguard advice response to Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) The result of the NPGC action is that some new gTLD’s in the same vertical will be open to anyone who wants to register a domain name, while others will fall into the highly restricted category and can …

NGPC recommendations for Name Collision on new gTLDs

Resolved (2013.10.07.NG01), the NGPC directs the President, Generic Domains Division to implement the proposal to manage the occurrence of collisions between new gTLDs and existing private uses of the same strings as presented in the “New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan” attached as Annex 1 [PDF, 840 KB], and in doing so to take into …

ICANN Board Prohibits Dotless Domain Names

At its meeting on 13 August 2013, the ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) adopted a resolution affirming that “dotless domain names” are prohibited. Dotless domain names are those that consist of a single label (e.g., http://example, or mail@example). Dotless names would require the inclusion of, for example, an A, AAAA, or MX, record …

ICANN Denies Booking.com Request To Reconsider String Similarity Panel Ruling; Sounds Like Bad News On Cam Vs Com

In turning down Booking.com request for reconsideration the ICANN Board appears to also have bad news for those that think the Board will step into settle the .Com Vs .Cam split decisions.As for Booking.com ton July 7th 2013, they submitted a  the ICANN Board to reconsider the ICANN staff action of 26 February 26th 2013, …

DotConnectAfrica requests for re-consideration of the NGPC Decision on its .africa application to the ICANN Governance Board

DotConnectAfrica is anticipating a review and reinstatement of their application for .africa gTLD string that has been in the center of controversy in the past two years since ICANN announced the major expansion of the Internet name space in Singapore. DotConnectAfrica’s application has been through enough hurdles that they have overcome. These include the change …