ICANN Board Governance Committee denies one .gay applicant’s request for reconsideration.
dotgay LLC has lost again in its attempt to get community status for its .Gay top level domain name application.
The company lost its first bid for community status, and then got a second crack at the Community Priority Evaluation process because of a procedural technicality. It lost that bid as well.
It then filed a request for reconsideration. ICANN’s Board Governance Committee just denied the request.
Unfortunately for ICANN, few outside the industry understand why dotgay LLC doesn’t get community status. That has resulted in a lot of negative publicity.
ICANN and the Economist Economic Intelligence unit aren’t saying there’s no such thing as a “gay” community. It has determined that dotgay LLC’s application for .gay for Community Priority does not meet the community-defined requirements.
Additionally, this does not mean that dotgay LLC can’t operate the domain name, and it doesn’t mean there will never be a .gay. The company can win rights to the domain name in an auction or arrangement with the other applicants for .gay.
In fact, .gay would probably exist on the web already if it weren’t for dotgay LLC’s attempts to circumvent the application guidelines.
ICANN has published a notice about the decision and what it means.
jmebaxter says
Since a reconsideration request is about process & policy violations, let’s not neglect the clear fact that dotgay brought forward such violations. One example is that despite the CPE Panel Process Document stating “[a]s part of this process, one of the two evaluators assigned to assess the same string is asked to verify the letters of support and opposition,” the BGC has acknowledged in their ruling that in fact it has been EIU’s core team members doing the letter verification all along, not the evaluators as written. This in itself if not following the process rules that the EIU wrote, and which ICANN approved, or perhaps a blurred line to cover up that the EIU never used new evaluators. ICANN has already admitted in their DIDP response to dotgay that they have no evidence of who the evaluators were, leading one to believe that they also have no proof they were new evaluators.
Andrew Allemann says
It wouldn’t make a difference on whether dotgay would have passed the CPE.
jmebaxter says
I beg to differ. This rule violation is one that had a risk of going public, and it is a violation that the EIU should have understood they would be called out on. The EIU clearly didn’t follow the script of their own CPE documents and didn’t seem to care they would be exposed for not following it. Or were they really just careless? Coupled with the fact that the EIU didn’t follow the rules during the first CPE on a separate element that went public, there is good cause to believe that other more egregious violations and/or carelessness took place behind closed doors. Such concerns were highlighted by dotgay and community organizations supporting the .GAY application, but without really looking into any of the details (in fact avoiding looking into the details) ICANN appears quite comfortable to simply “trust” the EIU has done a stand up job. And in all honestly, was the EIU ever really going to acknowledge that their first panel of evaluators got it wrong, especially if they didn’t get paid to perform the second CPE? Instead of ensuring a fair evaluation for the gay community, there seems to be a lot of damage control in motion to try and mask some false impression of integrity with the CPE process.
The point of all this is that if anyone from the gay community had the chance to question the EIU on their decision(s) and the apparent research they used to reach their decision, I suspect that the EIU and ICANN would have some serious explaining to do. Fortunately (and perhaps conveniently) for the EIU and ICANN, an appeals process doesn’t exist for community applicants to expose factual errors and unfair treatment, like experienced by .GAY. Instead, let’s all just go fall on our sword of process again, where public interest involving the LGBTQIA population can be ignored.