Left to right: Olga Cavalli, vice chair, Chuck Gomes, GNSO Council chair and Stéphane Van Gelder, vice chair. Photo INDOM.

Today was a landmark day for the Generic Names Supporting Organisation, aka GNSO, the place within ICANN that relates to generic top level domains (gTLDs).

The GNSO has been undergoing a restructure for over a year. It is a structure that aims to encompass all those parties who have interests in how gTLDs are managed and handled at policy level.

The new GNSO structure is bicameral, i.e. it has 2 houses. The Contracted Parties House, as its name suggests, groups those entities that have direct contracts with ICANN: the registries and the registrars. The other house is, unsurprisingly, called the Non Contracted Parties House. In it are the intellectual property people, the Internet service providers, the business users, and the non commercial users. In short, the contracted house is for the suppliers and the other is for the users.

The final step on the road to the new GNSO structure was scheduled for today, when a new Council would be seated which paralleled the new bicameral structure. Instead of the previous system, with a single chair/vice chair combo, the new configuration has one chair and 2 vice chairs, one from each house.

All the way through the run-up to today's Council meeting here at ICANN Seoul, during which the election was scheduled, there was doubt that with its new split structure, the Council would ever be able to coalesce around a common choice for chair.

ICM Registry Stuart Lawley is in Seoul for the 36th ICANN meeting, where he met with Peter Dengate Thursh (Chairman of the Board) and Rod Beckstrom (CEO) to discuss .XXX.

ICM have spent the last 2 years and USD 4,5 million in arbitration with ICANN before the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR). Several hearings were held in Washington, where Paul Twomey (Beckstrom's predecessor) was amongst the people heard by a three person arbitration panel.

Overall, Lawley reckons ICM have spent USD 8 million on .XXX. "We did everything ICANN asked us to do," Lawley says. "We even negotiated 5 draft contracts with them." He now hopes to have the result of the arbitration soon. "We're not asking for any damages," he adds. "We're not asking for money. We are asking for ICANN to sign the contract and let us launch .XXX."

It may take a few months for the arbitration panel to give a result. In the meantime, ICM are still accepting pre-registration requests from would-be .XXX domain name owners. "The pre-registration is completely free," Lawley explains. "And we're still getting requests every day. We're now up to 104,000 pre-registrations." Not bad for a domain that doesn't even exist yet.

ICANN's 36th international meeting officially gets underway today (Monday October 26), but the weekend has already involved a lot of work for several members of the ICANN community.

The GNSO Council on which I sit, for example, had two full days of meetings on Saturday and Sunday. And although we've been very involved in our restructuring process and upcoming Chair elections, there seems to be a common thread throughout all the community discussions: new gTLDs.

Walk into the main conference area, and almost all booths are about new gTLDs: consultancy or technical services, new gTLD projects… Open up the bags that are given to each person who registers for the meeting and you'll find a lot of new gTLD oriented sales blurb. Without a doubt, a thriving industry has sprung up around new gTLDs.

But how long will that new industry last if ICANN is unable to give potential applicants a clear timetable for the start of the application process? Latest word is that there will be a 4th version of the Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG). Kurt Pritz, ICANN's Senior Vice President, Services, told me that although the 3rd version that was published recently is almost complete, there is enough work remaining to warrant another draft before the final version comes out.

That could be in Q1 2010, meaning that the first round of applications could still be launched before the end of 2010.

Well this one's unexpected! ICANN has just announced that it has finally come to some sort of agreement with the UN's Universal Postal Union over .POST. This is the final (if you exclude the still very much in dispute .XXX) suffix that was okayed by ICANN as part of its 2003 limited round of new gTLD applications.

Since .POST was accepted by ICANN, the Internet's watchdog has never seen eye to eye with the UPU on the actual registry contract. Until now it seems.

It's difficult to think of this as pure coincidence. This comes just days before ICANN's last general meeting of the year and at a time when the current new gTLD program is being finalised, will no doubt be used to highlight the fact that previous new gTLD rounds were successful…

Internet overseer ICANN has set a tentative date for the launch of non-ASCII country code domains, or Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), for example a .RU written in Cyrillic, at November 16. Several countries are already planning to run an IDN TLD.

The latest such plan comes from the United Arab Emirates' Telecom Regulatory Authority TRA with a .EMARAT domain. In Arabic (.??????), this is the equivalent of the .AE country code which the UAE already uses. 

"Our objective is to support Arabic content over the Internet and build a strong identity for UAE and Arab countries across the World Wide Web," says Mohamed Naser Al Ghanim, TRA Director General.

This year, TRA has already launched a campaign to promote the use of its .AE domain and claims that registration levels have increased 30% this year and now stand at a total of 90,000 domains.

Namesmash is running a piece on the Sydney ICANN meeting in which I'm quoted on the IRT and the amount of work it meant for the people who took part. Although I genuinely feel that the IRT members selflessly put in a lot of their time and effort into the process, I hope it's clear that my quote is also a tongue in cheek attempt at highlighting the fact that in the end, the result is really the only thing that counts.

The namesmash piece is here.

ICANN's proposed expedited process for the release of non-ASCII character country code domains is about to become reality.

Prior to ICANN's international meeting in Seoul, Korea (Octobre 25-30), the final implementation plan for the IDN ccTLD fast-track has been published. The plan is to allow a limited number of countries to apply for their Internet suffix in their own alphabet, say a .RU in Cyrillic characters instead of the traditional ASCII code.

The fast-track has been in development for several years within the ICANN community and eagerly anticipated by countries such as Russia and China.

Once IDN ccTLDs are launched, Russian Internet users will be able to access websites using only Cyrillic character domain names, as both the name itself and the suffix will be localisable.

ICANN is proposing a November 16 2009 launch date for the fast-track.

ICANN's much anticipated 3rd version of the Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAGv3) for new generic Top Level Domains should be out early this week, perhaps even as soon as Monday October 5th.

Those eagerly waiting to get their hands on it will find those hands to be quite full once the DAGv3 does get published. ICANN Director of Communications and Product Services Karla Valente has revealed that between the guidebook itself, explanatory memoranda and other additional documents, a total of over 30 documents are to be published!

The new gTLD web page on the ICANN website will also be redesigned and launched at the same time as the DAGv3 is published.

The GNSO, ICANN's policy-making body for generic TLDs, is overseen by a Council made up of representatives from the GNSO's various stakeholder groups. For example, I sit on the Council as a representative of the Registrar Stakeholder Group.

The GNSO is currently being restructured. At the next ICANN meeting in Seoul, a new GNSO structure will be implemented, with a new Council being seated. As part of that new structure, one of the Stakeholder Groups, the NCSG (Non Commercial Stakeholder Group), has been awarded 6 representatives on the Council. But due to somewhat complex internal politics within the NCSG, it was decided that half of those reps would be chosen by the ICANN Board for the inaugural seating of the new GNSO Council.

So yesterday ICANN staff sent the Council a note indicating that the 3 Board appointees were Mohammed Rafik Dammak from Tunisia, Rosemary Sinclair from Australia and Debra Hughes from the United States. We were also told that their selection was the result of extensive due diligence and a careful review of the many people that had applied to the Board for the job.

All well and good, until I was made aware of an email from respected ICANN community member Bret Fausett sent to the At Large (another of ICANN's community structures) mailing list.

After several months evaluating candidates, the City of Paris has chosen its back-end services provider for .PARIS.

Several registry services specialists applied for the position and a twin candidate set-up combining AFNIC (the French registry) and CORE (back-end provider for .CAT) was selected.

As consultant to City of Paris, INDOM was heavily involved in the selection process and will now work alongside AFNIC and CORE on the .PARIS project.