New TLD applicants turn to Interisle for more data in effort to avoid more delays.
Interisle Consulting Group dropped a bombshell on new top level domain name applicants when it submitted its 197 page report to ICANN about name collisions and new top level domain names.
As a result of the report, about 20% of applied-for strings were grouped into an “uncalculated risk” pool, which means that they could face three to six months of delays as ICANN further studies their risk potential.
This has led a number of new TLD applicants to collect their own data to try to counter the notion that delegating their domains could cause harm to internet users.
One beneficiary: Interisle Consulting Group, which is making more money by performing follow on work for applicants who were shelved into the bad buckets.
Dot Club, the sole remaining applicant for .club, commissioned a report from Interisle to determine where .club traffic was coming from. Dot Club determined (pdf) that it can mitigate most of the risk by restricting the use of the top 50 most queried second level strings. By doing so, the company believes it would qualify for the “low risk” qualification, which won’t face such lengthy delays.
A number of large applicants are pooling resources to collect similar data without Interisle’s help. For most of the smaller applicants, though, I suspect paying Interisle will end up being their most cost effective approach to try to avoid further delays.
Andrew,
Your article may leave the wrong impression here about Interisle. First of all, we contacted Interisle to help us gather the appropriate data in regards to potential domain collision.
We were already members of DNS-OARC so we had alternatives but we felt that we needed extra support from a firm that truly understood the issue. We called them and asked them if they would run a report in regards to DITL for 2013. Interisle acted in a professional and ethical manner in all of our dealings.
Hopefully this report will give other gTLD applicants a guideline for getting classified as a “low risk”.
Colin
Ceo.club
Colin, I understand that they didn’t solicit the work. Thanks for verifying that, though.
Irregardless, episodes like this have to leave interested GTLD related businesses wondering. What was the impetus for such financial outlay and risk without apparent knowledge that one later needs to solicit and pay for?
Why was this research not done post application?
Kind of feeds back to Rick S revelation in a post today that some applicants may not be prepared?
Not judging but certainly skeptical about registry applicants motives and intentions and credibility after reading articles like this.
TLD are awesome always! 🙂