The comment period for the 4th version of ICANN's Draft Applicant Guidebook for the new gTLD program closed yesterday (July 21).
Although as it stands, the DAG is nearly finished, a couple of grey areas remain. One is the issue of morality and public order (MAPO), and who should judge, according to what criteria. The other is about separation between registrars and registries.
It is INDOM's view that the strict separation requirements introduced in the DAGv4 are both unfair and anti-competitive. We said as much in the comment we sent to ICANN a few days ago. We are encouraged to see others (here and here for example) picking up on our comments and agreeing with them.
The final version of the guidebook is scheduled to be released before the next ICANN meeting (Cartagena in December). It is our hope that it will not contain rules that prohibit ICANN-accredited registrars from being involved, in any way whatsoever, in a TLD.
As we wrote in our comment to ICANN: "With the Guidebook as it is currently written, those with in-depth domain name expertise are excluded, except existing registries. Entities without this expertise would be accepted. This is akin to giving a license to provide medical services to anyone except doctors."
