The comment period for the 4th version of ICANN's Draft Applicant Guidebook for the new gTLD program closed yesterday (July 21).

Although as it stands, the DAG is nearly finished, a couple of grey areas remain. One is the issue of morality and public order (MAPO), and who should judge, according to what criteria. The other is about separation between registrars and registries.

It is INDOM's view that the strict separation requirements introduced in the DAGv4 are both unfair and anti-competitive. We said as much in the comment we sent to ICANN a few days ago. We are encouraged to see others (here and here for example) picking up on our comments and agreeing with them.

The final version of the guidebook is scheduled to be released before the next ICANN meeting (Cartagena in December). It is our hope that it will not contain rules that prohibit ICANN-accredited registrars from being involved, in any way whatsoever, in a TLD.

As we wrote in our comment to ICANN: "With the Guidebook as it is currently written, those with in-depth domain name expertise are excluded, except existing registries.  Entities without this expertise would be accepted.  This is akin to giving a license to provide medical services to anyone except doctors."

We posted our comments on the latest draft of the Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs yesterday.

They can be read here.  For those who don't have time to go to the ICANN website to read them, here's an excerpt giving the general gist of what we said:

"We feel the forced exclusion of ICANN-accredited registrars from the new gTLD program is unfounded, detrimental to consumer and applicant choice and would lead incumbents in the registry market to enjoy unfair protectionism. It must not be implemented in the Final Guidebook."

So sex.com is once again making headlines. Sedo has just announced that it has been retained by Escom LLC, the owner of the domain, to handle its sale through its second-hand domain sales platform.

The name will be sold along with two related trademark registrations, making this a pretty complete package for any interest buyer.

There's little doubt the name will sell, but at what price? Just how valuable is it on today's Internet? Enough to see Escom cover some (if not all) of the $14 million loan it took out to buy the domain in 2006 and has since been unable to repay?