Frequently Asked Questions

Great question! The Early Warning Report Service was founded by Ray King and Marc Trachtenberg who have a proven track record of domain name industry experience and success. Ray is the CEO of Top Level Design, which acquired a number of popular new gTLDs in the first round and after, and later sold them all. He is also the CEO of Porkbun, one of the largest domain registrars, which just surpassed 3 million domains under management. Marc is an attorney who specializes in internet and domain name matters. He has been actively involved in ICANN for over 20 years and represents registries, registrars, search engines, eCommerce platforms, social media companies, and other online intermediaries. He is also counsel to the Brand Registry Group, which is the leading trade association for owners of .Brand TLDs. Marc participated in the policy development process for the first round of new gTLDs in 2015 and assisted with dozens of new gTLD applications in that round. He later assisted in numerous TLD acquisitions on the buy and sell sides and participated also in the the policy development process for the upcoming round of new gTLD applications.

The cost for participation in the Pre-Application Early Warning Report is $1,000 per string. The cost for participation in the Post-Application Early Warning Report is $3,000 per string. Participants in the Pre-Application Early Warning Report will only be charged $2,000 per string in the Post-Application Early Warning Report for strings they previously submitted.

No, unless every potential applicant participates this is not possible. But even if only some applicants participate, those who do will have more information and a competitive advantage.

This is possible but there is no incentive for participants to do this as they would only be depriving themselves of valuable data points. For the Post-Application Report we will be doing some measure of verification.

No. The rules for the next round prohibit sharing information and private resolution of contention sets after Reveal Day. The Early Warning Report Service operates outside the application process and ends before Reveal Day.

There is no requirement to participate, but not participating may put you at a competitive disadvantage to other applicants who will have more information available to them enabling them to make strategic decisions before they are locked into the ICANN process and must forfeit significant amounts of their application investment if they withdraw or lose at auction. Think of it as cheap insurance to protect your potential application investment.

Yes! A neutral and trusted intermediary will be used to ensure the security, integrity, and confidentiality of all strings submitted to the Early Warning Report Service and who submitted them.

The only people with access to the data will be the trusted third party intermediary. Not even the principals or staff of the Early Warning Report will have access.

The trusted third party intermediary will follow ICANN's string similarity rules when creating Early Warning Report contention sets.

All fees will be refunded if a threshold of 200 strings are not submitted for the Pre-Application Early Warning Report.