Thursday, December 5, 2013

The Grapes of Wrath? An Insight Into .WINE, the Most Hotly Debated TLD in Government Circles

This is my latest artciel published about .WINE.

Everybody agrees, all .WINE applicants want to find where the buck is going to stop, as far as the strange stalemate we have been in for so many months. Situation? "What situation?" I hear you asking.

In July 2012, when applications and the name of their applicants were released to the public, it appeared that 3 applicants had the same idea, when they applied for a .WINE Top-Level Domain.

More on CircIeId.

What is the procedure to unblock a second level domain from an blocked SLD list?

This is the question I submitted to ICANN a few days ago.

Of course, when I send such a question, it is not tivial :-) With the number of highly interesting domain names you can find on these lists of blocked domain names, you can expect this is already an issue and this question will come inevitably. At the moment, it is unclear if it will be possible to unblock these domains or not.

An example: "bordeaux" is one of these blocked second level domains in the .WINE Registry. It means "bordeaux.wine" can't be registered. A joke...

The first answer I received from the support was expected but terrible too, and here it is:

"We are working on your request and will get back to you as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience.In the meantime, you may want to review our last Webinar FAQ document we published herehttp://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/webinar-qa-23oct13-en.pdf . Please refer to the Name Collision Q/A. Thank you."

Basically: "try to find the answer yourself in the FAQs"... and I already know the answer won't be there anyway. So I returned the answer after and what follows is what I really call support:

"Hello, Actually, I tried to read the first 10 pages but it has nothing to do with my question and since it is not in my language, I do not want to read the remaining 20 pages of your FAQ document. It is the reason why I write to you. I will wait until you get back to me. Thank you."

ICANN support is +1
At this moment, I thought I would never get an answer in return but a few days after, I received a message: 

"We are continuing to work on a resolution response and will provide you the details as soon as the information is available"

I received the same message again a few days after wondering if this was not a loophole. Apparently not and I finally got this message from the support:

"Dear Jean Guillon,
Thank you for contacting the New gTLD Customer Service.
Please note that the SLD block lists are a temporary measure to allow Registry Operators to move forward without compromising the security or stability.
Q./ What is the procedure to unblock a second level domain from an blocked SLD list?
The blocking should be in effect until the mitigation measures described in the respective TLD Name Collision Occurrence Assessment have been applied.
Indeed, the implementation of the mitigation measures may allow the release of blocked Second-Level Domains, based on analysis or evidence that the cause of collision occurrence has been mitigated. Thank you."

This is the answer I expected from the ICANN support. I am aware they can't have a procedure already but since my initial question is going to be asked and asked again to all Registries by Registrars and Registrants, I get an answer here: these names won't be blocked forever so bordeaux.wine will probably be live one day.

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !