The much anticipated “Reveal Day” — so dubbed by ICANN itself — has now come and gone without fanfare. May 1st was to be the day when ICANN was scheduled to publish the list of all applied-for new generic top level domains (gTLDs) as part of the roll-out of the new Internet era. Instead, all that was revealed today was that ICANN remains mired in technical glitches.
ICANN announced last Friday that, though it had hoped to re-open the online application system on April 27th, the system would remain shut down. ICANN now plans to notify all applicants within the next seven business days (by May 8th) as to whether their applications were affected by the “technical glitch” in the TLD application system. The “technical glitch” at issue is that ICANN’s application system allowed a limited number of users to view some other users’ file names and user names. For the past two and a half weeks, ICANN has been (and continues to be) reviewing its internal system logs and full packet-level capture of all traffic to and from the application system from when it opened the application system on January 12th until it was shut down on April 12th. After it notifies all applicants, ICANN will announce a new schedule for reopening the system and allowing applicants to confirm the completeness of their applications. At the time the application system was shut down, the number of registrants in the system was 1,268. According to ICANN, this number could change (for example, for applicants that might withdraw or were in the process of submitting their $5000 deposit when the system was taken offline). Many business (and their trademark counsel) are anxious to review the list of which .BRANDS and .GENERICS have been applied-for.
But, alas, it seems that nothing will be revealed anytime soon.
