16 October 2013
On 7 October 2013 the ICANN Board's New gTLD Program Committee approved resolutions directing staff to implement the New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan ("The Plan") [PDF, 840 KB]. The steps that a new gTLD applicant has to follow to get delegated have not changed. Below is an explanation as to how the Plan is being implemented and how it will affect the contracting, pre-delegation testing and delegation phases of the program.
1. Contracting
ICANN is updating the Registry Agreement for new gTLDs in order to implement the Plan. Specification 6, which addresses Registry Interoperability and Continuity, has been updated to include the registry operator obligations called for in the Plan, including a 120-day no-activation period, and name collision report handling responsibilities. Additional details and a link to the revisions to Specification 6 will be included in a separate announcement to be posted shortly.
Registries that have already signed the Registry Agreement and Supplement have been notified directly via email, pursuant to Section 1 of the RA Supplement. Those Registries need not take any action – the Required Change will incorporate seamlessly into the RA with no further action required by the Registry Operator or by ICANN.
Applications that were previously not eligible for contract signing only because of the "uncalculated risk" classification, will now begin receiving contracts for signature in order of priority.
All new Registry Agreements sent for signature as of today will include the updated Specification 6.
2. Pre-Delegation Testing
The requirements and process of Pre-Delegation Testing (PDT) are unchanged. Applicants that execute a Registry Agreement are eligible to begin PDT. Current requirements can be found on the PDT page of the microsite.
3. Transition to Delegation
Before a Registry Operator can initiate its transition to delegation it must implement the measures described in its SLD Collision Occurrence Assessment. Until the assessment is ready, most Registry Operators are expected to be eligible for the alternative path to delegation as described below.
The Plan allows for a Registry Operator to proceed with an alternative path to delegation prior to receiving its full SLD Collision Occurrence Assessment. If ICANN determines that the gTLD is eligible for the alternative path to delegation, and the Registry Operator chooses to block all relevant Second-Level Domains (SLDs) as designated by ICANN, then the Registry Operator may proceed to delegation. The list of SLDs to be blocked will be customized to each TLD based on the actual requests observed in the "Day in the Life of the Internet (DITL)" data from 2006 to 2013 maintained by DNS-OARC.
The determination will be based on assessments of the level of variance of the SLDs observed in each year of the DITL data. High variance might indicate that blocking SLDs that appear in the historical data may not be an adequate mitigation plan. In that event, delegation must wait until a full assessment can be conducted and a full mitigation plan specified as described in the Plan.
For Registry Operators with executed registry agreements the Assessments and SLD lists will be posted to the specific TLD's registry agreement page on the ICANN website. The first of these will be available before the end of this week.
In the coming weeks ICANN will post the alternative path eligibility assessments and SLD lists for all applied-for gTLDs.
Once the above steps are completed, ICANN will initiate the transition to delegation process via the customer portal.