ICANN Updates Application Change Request Process

Today, 30 September 2014, ICANN published updates to the application change request process. Updates can be viewed at the Change Request page of the Microsite. The major changes include:

• Certain types of changes will no longer be posted for comments for 30 days:
  • Changes to confidential portions of the application
  • Changes to primary and secondary contacts of the application
  • Changes to the applicant’s contact information (address, phone, fax, web address)
  • Changes to applicant’s stock symbol
  • Changes to applicant’s business/tax ID
  • Changes to applicant’s officers/directors
  • Changes to name of applying entity*
  • Changes to parent entity

  • The application will no longer be held for 30 days for the community to comment on the above changes because details of changes to confidential portions are not published, and the other changes listed above are updates to the application as a normal course of business. ICANN reserves the right to make exceptions to these practices and post changes for public comments in its discretion.

• In cases where the change request requires re-evaluation, the re-evaluation will no longer be a part of the core change request process. Spitting re-evaluations into its own process will allow ICANN to better report on SLAs for change requests and prevent applicants from gaming the process and delaying other applications in the same contention set.

ICANN will also start reporting on change request statistics on a monthly basis. These monthly statistics will be available on the Change Request page of the New gTLD Microsite.

* This item refers to a simple name change of the applying entity only. It does not apply to changes in the applying entity itself such as the case of the application being assigned from a parent entity to a wholly-owned subsidiary.