ICANN expects to kick off its implementation efforts for the next rounds of new gTLDs next month. The Org is putting together its Implementation Review Team, a group of community members that will help shepherd staff into turning policy into reality. Each supporting organization, advisory committee and constituency will get to nominate a representative (and [...] Continue reading →

Domain registrar Epik has been sued by a customer who says he is owed $327,000 over an aborted secondary market purchase. Matthew Adkisson says he paid the sum to Epik to buy the domain nourish.com from a third-party seller, with Epik paid $27,000 for its escrow service. However, Adkisson alleges, the sale fell through and [...] Continue reading →

The registrant of chatgpt.com must have thought he’d hit the motherlode when he picked up the domain last December, almost a month after it launched and days after the wildly popular AI chatbot had already received rave reviews from the global press. What he got instead was a UDRP complaint with WIPO, which ChatGPT maker [...] Continue reading →

ICANN interim CEO Sally Costerton will today release an album of rap music, in an effort to attract more young people to the ICANN community. Costerton told DI today that it’s become obvious in recent years that ICANN’s community is aging rapidly, and that attracting new, younger talent is vital to ensuring the Org’s [...] Continue reading →

A company controlled by Warner Bros Discovery is dumping four of its dot-brand gTLDs, but keeping hold of .food, which it has been sitting on, unused for the better part of eight years. Lifestyle Domain Holdings has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .foodnetwork, .travelchannel, .hgtv and .cookingnetwork, which are four of its [...] Continue reading →

Google Registry has announced launch details for eight new gTLDs that it has been sitting on for almost a decade. It plans to launch .foo, .zip, .mov, .nexus, .dad, .phd, .prof and .esq over the coming couple of months, with all eight following the same launch schedule. Sunrise will begin this weekend, April 2, and [...] Continue reading →

Public Interest Registry has started vetting potential registry service provider replacements for Identity Digital, ahead of a formal request for proposals later this year. The company said this week that in order to run .org’s back-end, which would have to support almost 11 million domains, an RSP would have to hit a list of high-end [...] Continue reading →