The battle over ownership of the .gay namespace is heating up: a company hoping to maintain it for community good is duking it out with three applicants who want to monetize it.
So far the community-minded applicant is facing an uphill battle. Questions are emerging as to why that is, and if those charged with overseeing the situation are going against their own policies, The Advocate reports.
The non-profit organization Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is responsible for contracting with those operating Internet namespaces. The operators are then responsible for what policies they use to manage those namespaces.
Related: Religious Groups Will Get A Chance To Block .Gay Domain Names
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In 2009, dotgay LLC, created by Scott Seitz applied to manage .gay and run it as a resource for LGBTQ groups and organizations around the world. It initiated outreach on every continent and picked up over 250 endorsements from the likes of the Human Rights Campaign, National Center for Lesbian Rights, InterPride and National LGBTQ Task Force.
If dotgay LLC could prove they represented the LGBTQ community, through the Community Priority Evaluation process, they would become the owner of .gay.
They entered into that process in 2014, with ICANN’s third-party contractors, the Economist Intelligence Unit, determining the outcome. They rejected the application, saying they could not show that those groups that supported dotgay LLC were stakeholders of the gay community.
A second evaluation was conducted after a backlash surrounding a lack of transparency or quality control to ensure ICANN’s nondiscrimination policies were upheld.
ICANN’s ombudsman came out in support of dotgay LLC, writing in a statement that the board should “look at the bigger picture” and “grant the community application status to the applicant and put an end to this long and difficult issue.”
It further encouraged them to “take a major step in recognising the role of ICANN in complying with its own policies and well established human rights principles.”
Related: Does Obama Want To Block Your Chances Of Buying BarackIsSo.Gay?
While ICANN defended their decision and stated that their policies were not applicable to the Economist Intelligence Unit, the recent decision Dot Registry v ICANN showed it had violated its own bylaws and articles of incorporation around transparency, fairness, and nondiscrimination by conspiring with the Economist Intelligence Unit on Community Priority Evaluation decisions for .LLP, .INC and .LLC.
If dotgay LLC continues to fail in its attempts to prove they represent the community and should be grated .gay as a result, they will have to participate in an auction against their rivals to determine ownership.
AlliterationAddict
It’s a little bit more complicated than that. A while back, ICANN allowed independent organizations to register their own high level domains as long as they maintained the addressing servers. Suffice it to say, that was a . . . less than brilliant decision. Honestly, they should have never allowed that in the first place, and continued with the original top level domains. Anyway, you’re now running into the problem where in theory, should dotgay LLC be granted the domain name, they would have master control over any person who wants to be addressed under that domain. They could kick out people on a whim, or register domains under that name to homophobic groups. It all depends on whether or not you trust that particular group of people to run that entire domain responsibly, and under the ICANN bylaws they are allowed to get away with letting us know practically nothing about them. So while I lay the blame solely at the feet of ICANN, the problem was allowing those privately administrated top-level domains in the first place. This is just a logical continuation of that poor decision.
Samantha Johns
In response to AlliterationAddict. It appears you are unfamiliar with what has been proposed in the Dotgay LLC application for .gay. I was part of organized discussions in creating a community path for .gay and watched the policy development for such a path very closely. Dotgay LLC plans would allow for none of what you have suggested. In fact the community model mission is to address such issues of safety, visibility and support for the LGBTQIA. In our discussions we encouraged it be a priority that Dotgay LLC ensure the community had a voice in the operations to prevent the exact things you claim would happen. Dotgay LLC was more than accommodating and supported the idea whole heartedly so that operations didn’t drift to far from community interest. The behavior you suggest in comment is however likely to happen if Dotgay LLC does not get .gay because the other companies trying to beat Dotgay LLC have no plans in place to prevent homophobic groups from registering .gay web address.
DCguy
@Samantha Johns:
You claimed the other poster was wrong but posted nothing to prove it. If the group is as benign as you say, why not post it’s bylaws or charter. That would prove your point.
Also, would the ground be taking any money for use of the .gay domaine?