Group wins Community Priority Evaluation for .Spa.
Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council Limited has won (for now) the sole right to operate the .Spa top level domain name after winning a Community Priority Evaluation for the name.
The group scored 14 points (pdf) out of 16 to prevail. It lost one point for “Content and Use” and one for “Community Endorsement” under support.
According to its application, Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council Limited “is the regional coordinating body for the promotion of spa and wellness centres. We assist national and regional organisations in promoting spa and wellness centres both inter- and intra-regionally to an audience of wellness tourists, health practitioners and other stakeholders.”
As the group’s name and description implies, ASWPC certainly doesn’t represent the entire spa community. I could tell you more about the group, but its website is down because it has exceeded its bandwidth capacity.
As a result of the decision, Donuts is currently out of the running for the domain name. It already fought off a challenge by the Belgian government, which argued that the name is derived from a small Belgian town. ASWPC struck a deal with the town.
Don’t expect this to be the end of the fight for .Spa, though. Donuts Vice President of Communications and Industry Relations Mason Cole released this statement to Domain Name Wire:
Donuts is aware of the community priority evaluation report recommending that ICANN grant community status to another applicant for the .SPA gTLD. Clearly the panel’s recommendation is in contravention of the Applicant Guidebook as the applicant did not meet the criteria set forth for community names. Donuts will vigorously oppose this ruling and will make all use of all available remedies at its disposal.
Minds + Machines originally applied for .spa, but withdrew its application in 2013 over concerns about government action on the name.
Joseph Peterson says
This ICANN process for evaluating community status continues to produce ludicrous, inconsistent results.
Ask the average person which of these TLDs correspond to a unified community with an organization that represents everybody, and see if they guess better than a coin toss: .GAY, .SPA, .SPORT, .BASKETBALL, .PERSIANGULF, etc.
What looks absurd or arbitrary to a layperson ought to matter, since it’s we billions of potential registrants and online consumers that ICANN is meant to represent.
Constantine Roussos (.MUSIC) says
Joseph,
The AGB rule refers to organizations that are MAINLY dedicated to the community. “Mainly” means “for the most part.” There is no rule that says that you need one organization that represents “everyone” related to the community that is defined by the community applicant.
Also in terms of “support”, it is about cumulative support (i.e. all the support letters together) that counts for “majority.” In this case the EIU gave 1/2 points for support (they agreed with you Joseph) that the supporting organization (ISA) did not represent a majority (the rules are that you get 2/2 points if the community applicant has a “majority” of the community as defined by community applicant not “everyone”).
Donuts will continue their pattern of anti-competitive behavior and file bogus IRPs to hold prevailing community applicants (and ICANN for that matter) hostage. Nothing new here since they want to force private auctions. So when a community applicant does not prevail Donuts hails the EIU and ICANN but when they do not, they attack both the EIU and ICANN with statements and actions stating that they will “vigorously oppose the ruling.” You were talking about inconsistencies. How about inconsistent (yet predictable) behavior by applicants such as Donuts depending on what fits their story?
Joseph Peterson says
The mechanism undoubtedly has some logic. But I prefer to know as little as possible about the inner workings of such policies because my field is about what happens afterward.
Treating these ICANN processes as a black box, most people will judge the outcome intuitively. Either it makes sense to the majority of registrants and consumers, or it fails to make sense.
Constantine Roussos (.MUSIC) says
I agree 100% about doing what makes sense and focusing on what the general public perceives.
A good way to view such community applications is using a “deduction” test to prove whether it makes sense or not.
For example, if you were to completely “eliminate” a community applicant’s supporters and influence how what that community look like and would it change global consumption as we know it know. I have no issues talking about our initiative on this topic. See our supporters here: http://music.us/supporters
I will take your “consumer” standpoint and use our .MUSIC community initiative as an example. Our supporters represent over 95% of music consumed globally. These include the major labels, indies, publishers etc. So let me ask a simple question: If you remove all these supporters and their members that our initiative represents then a reasonable person would deduce that consumers would be harmed because the majority of the music that they currently enjoy will no longer exist for their listening pleasure.
I will make it simpler. Let us say you were a subscriber to a digital music service and you pay $10 a month for it. Then you find out that all the musicians and their music that is represented by those supporting our initiative is not included, how would you feel? Would it be good for consumers? This “deduction” example proves there is a music community because if there was not one you would not be listening to the music that you are listening to.
If we cannot prevail with the level of support we have and the music-tailored policies we included (which also address copyright – http://music.us/enhanced-safeguards), then how does one pass CPE in our instance?
What makes sense sometimes goes contrary when it comes to the New gTLD Program. You would think that GAC Advice and ICANN Resolutions passed after community objections were filed against applicants with exclusive access policies and applicants without safeguards for strings in regulated sectors would mean automatic elimination. That never happened but you will never hear Amazon, Donuts and other applicants complaining about fairness and consistency issues with respect to community objections with those strings addressed by the GAC Beijing advice because it would have been automatic elimination.
I agree with your emphasis on logic. I would welcome that. Many would. But for others it is about what fits their story.
Constantine Roussos (.MUSIC) says
Andrew,
This article is a bit flawed. It confuses your readers.
You say that the “ASWPC certainly doesn’t represent the entire spa community.”
Why is this statement even relevant? The AGB does not contemplate such an impossible requirement.
The ASWPC does NOT claim to represent the “entire spa community.” Can you please show your readers where in the AGB it says that a community applicant or a single supporter has to “represent the ENTIRE community?” Exactly, such a statement was fabricated and spread by some groups to “spin” what fits their story.
Unless you can show your readers the exact AGB language that requires a community applicant to have a single organization that represents the ENTIRE community, I would not continue this misreporting concerning CPE results.
Furthermore, what was considered was the support letter from the International Spa Association (ISA), which the community applicant [ASWPC] cites as an example of a community organization and from which the applicant has received a letter of support. You could easily argue that the ISA is an organization MAINLY (i.e. for most part) dedicated to the Spa community (unless you can prove that the International Spa Association “for the most part” serves another community that does not concern the “spa” community.
Please read the CPE Guidelines here: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/cpe/guidelines-27sep13-en.pdf
The AGB/CPE Language on “Community Establishment:”
– “Organized” implies that there is at least one entity mainly dedicated to the community (pg.4).
– “Mainly” could imply that the entity administering the community may have additional roles/functions beyond administering the community, but one of the key or primary purposes/functions of the entity is to administer a community or a community organization.(pg.4)
Clearly the “International Spa Association” meets this criteria for Community Establishment.
The AGB/CPE Language on “Support:”
– Does the applicant have support from at least one group with relevance? (pg.17)
– Are there multiple institutions/organizations supporting the application, with documented support from institutions/organizations representing a majority of the overall community addressed? (pg.18)
The community applicant received 1 point for receiving a letter of support from 1 group of relevance (i.e. the ISA). But they lost one point because the supporting organizations (in this case only the ISA) did not represent “a majority” of the community addressed.
Again the word is “majority” not “entire” and this counts for an additional point.