Nastic Gryzunova. Seine: issue 128

The somewhat hopeless process of recognizing applications for new domain zones submitted to ICANN has finally ended: on Friday, a report and expert assessments of all previously received proposals were published on the corporation's website - almost a day late, but let's not quibble. The goal was to weed out untenable projects; The experts have done quite well in weeding out a lot.

The domains that suffered the most were .kids and .xxx, the introduction of which seemed almost a foregone conclusion. As a result, experts did not recommend considering the possibility of activating both zones at this stage. And their arguments sound more than reasonable: there is no way to force all adult sites to migrate from the domains they currently occupy to domains in the .xxx zone, just as there is no way to guarantee that only projects intended for for children, and that only children will attend them (the latter is not a mandatory condition, obviously). And since the reinsurance rush in the United States is somewhat limited by the First Amendment, discussion of the introduction of these two zones has not yet been declared worth the effort.

The positives outlined in the expert group’s report boil down to the following:

ICANN is encouraged to review any of the custom domain registration applications (.nom, .per, .i, .name, .san and .xing).

ICANN is also encouraged to select a limited number of domain zones from a huge list of generic domain zone applications (from .biz, .firm and .inc to .news, .shop and .store).

Of the applications for “professional” domains (.fin, .law, .travel and .pro), the experts were conditionally impressed only by the proposal of the RegistryPro company regarding the administration of the zone, respectively, .pro, but they also found it not convincing enough.

Applications for a number of specialized domain zones (.co-op, .coop, .union, .event, .museum, .air, .post and .health) are considered worthy of attention.

Final clarity, as is easy to understand, will not be available for a very long time.