There’s been a delay (surprise!) after the first four TLD contracts were signed.
ICANN took advantage of its public meeting in Durban, South Africa last month for a public signing of the first four top level domain name contracts.
It’s been a full month since then, and no one else has signed a contract yet.
ICANN has just published a new statistics page to track the progress of registry signings. Although only four have signed so far, it looks like a lot more are moving through the queue:
– Contracting Information Request notifications to eligible applicants holding priority numbers 1 – 400
– 217 applicants have been invited to Contracting
– 38 applicants have responded to their Contracting Information Request invitation
ICANN had said that about 20 contracts would be finalized each week. I suspect once the engine gets moving that will be the case.
Richard Funden says
Goes to show that the signing event in Durban was all show, no substance.
Fahd A. Batayneh says
The .موقع (.site in Arabic) IDN gTLD was invited to sign the Registry contract on July 25. Since there is not much information as to the options provided for a Registry to sign a contract (physical signing, electronic signing, accredited agents to sign on behalf of a Registry,… etc), we sent some questions to ICANN’s customer support service, and so far we have not heard back from them! Yes, more than 3 weeks ago, and counting…
Not just is ICANN’s customer support taking longer than needed to answer some simple questions, but those who have to travel 20+ hours and spend close to 3,000 USD to sign ONE contract that would take no more than a couple of seconds to finalize must have more options in hand.