Earlier this year IFFOR announced plans to expand its services to applicants in the new gTLD program through a new "Policy Engine" service.
As part of this approach, IFFOR developed a draft set of “safeguard policies” to provide an efficient solution to some of the requests that came from ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) at its meeting in Beijing.
We have been very encouraged by the feedback we have received to date and it is clear that a significant policy gap exists for many of the new Internet extensions that hope to go live within the next 12 months. However, we have also heard consistent concerns about IFFOR’s close ties with ICM Registry and our role as its Sponsoring Organization.
IFFOR was specifically created to provide policy services for dot-xxx domains, and those policies have been met with praise from consumer protection, child protection, law enforcement and trademark owners around the world. We are proud of our work in this area and serving ICM Registry and the Sponsored Community will always remain our priority.
Additionally, ICM Registry recently resolved a long-standing lawsuit that should lead to greater adoption of dot-xxx domains. As a result, the IFFOR Board has decided it will maintain an exclusive focus on the dot-xxx registry and discontinue the Policy Engine service.
We are actively exploring how these gTLD policy services and the safeguard policies solution can be made available to interested parties through a third-party organization and are confident that they will prove of significant use to the domain industry.
If you have any questions with respect to the Policy Engine service or Safeguard Policies, please contact a member of IFFOR’s management team.