October 14-18, 2012 the 45th International ICANN Public Meeting was held in Toronto. About 1500 representatives of companies and organizations working on the domain name market as well as in the Internet governance and network technology areas took part in the event.

The key topic of the conference was the New gTLD Program targeted at the implementation of a number of new top-level domains. In particular, the order of domains‘ introduction in course of the New gTLD Program was discussed. For this purpose ICANN has developed the DRAW proposal, which is a lottery for the New gTLD applicants. According to the DRAW each applicant will be proposed to take a card for each of its applications. A card will contain a number indicating the time when an application will be processed.

According to the DRAW the IDN applications will get the highest priority and the rest of applications will be processed after them. The lottery will be held in December and the first results of the applications’ evaluation will be announced by ICANN after March 13, 2013. After the ICANN Meeting that will take place in Beijing next year in April, the process of signing the contracts and domains’ delegation according to the serial numbers generated from the DRAW lottery, will begin.

In general, ICANN Meeting participants appreciated the DRAW proposal. However, a few suggestions for its improvement were made at the event.

In particular, the group of applicants for geographical top-level domains (GeoTLDs) held a special meeting in Toronto. After the meeting official comment on the importance of the priority implementation of geographical domains, as it is done for IDNs, will be forwarded to ICANN. The group explains its position with the community’s interest in georaphical TLDs, and with the fact that their introduction is supported by the public authorities of many countries.

The comment of the GeoTLDs group was prepared with the participation of the leading experts of the Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development that took part in the ICANN Meeting in Toronto. In particular, the document explains that the priority evaluation of IDN applications only causes problems for the projects like the initiative for .MOSCOW и .МОСКВА implementation. It is a good example of a situation when the same applicant introduces two similar domains (IDN and ASCII) for the same geographical location. If the priority is given only to the IDNs, their counterparts in ASCII will be probably intorduced much later. Experts say there would be much more sense to launch .MOSCOW and .МОСКВА domains simultaneously, especially due to the fact that policies for both domains are the same.

At the 45th ICANN Meeting FAITID team took part in the discussion of other important issues related to the New gTLD Program. Particularly, the session dedicated to the implementation of the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS), aimed at resolving domain disputes in the new gTLDs, was held during the Meeting. Also the options for launch of the Trademark Clearinghouse to be used by new TLD registries within the Sunrise and Trademark Claims periods were discussed. Finally, the first official meeting of the New TLDs Applicant Group (NTAG) that unites most of the new gTLD applicants took place in Toronto.

As memebers of NTAG and GeoTLD, the Foundation’s experts will continue to participate in the work on the New gTLD procedures. The next meeting of the groups will be organized at the ICANN Meeting in Beijing. Till this time the discussions within NTAG and GeoTLD will be held remotely.