The first Sunrise for .ASIA ends today (Tuesday October 30). As validation agent Bart Lieben explains, the onus is very much on helping as many applicants get through the process as possible.
Bart Lieben has been at the center of both the .EU and .ASIA Sunrise validation procedures
Before working for Deloitte-affiliated lawyer firm Laga, Bart Lieben was employed by .EU validation agent price Waterhouse Coopers. He's therefore worked closely on the two major new extension launches of the past couple of years and has a unique view of the similarities and differences between the two startup processes. Domaines.Info met up with Bart during the LA ICANN meeting the day before .ASIA's first Sunrise period was scheduled to end.
What are the initial results of the first Sunrise that's ending tomorrow, Tuesday October 30? Because .ASIA's process allows for people to submit their requests until the very end of each Sunrise period, it's still too early to give any specific numbers. However, we are already seeing one major trend appearing: the percentage of rejected applications is a lot less for .ASIA than for .EU. It's about 10% for .ASIA as compared to about 50% for .EU. The reason for this is the greater amount of flexibility built into the .ASIA Sunrise validation process. We're still checking three main criteria: is the mark owner really the one applying for the name, is the mark identical to the name being requested and was the mark being claimed registered before the cut-off date? But the difference with .EU is that we're allowed to make small corrections. Unfortunately, .EU's rules prohibited us from doing so. But we've made corrections to about 60% of the .ASIA Sunrise requests we've had. Say, for example, that the trademark claimed doesn't match the name exactly, we can access trademark databases to check if the applicant has a matching trademark and if so, we can still validate the request.
That must mean you've had to deal with an increased workload compared to .EU… Yes that's true, but it's part of the commitment we made to both the registry and applicants when we signed the .ASIA validation contract. Obviously we can't do everything. For .EU, a lot of registrars complained that the Sunrise process was too complicated. It wasn't, but we couldn't step in for registrars who were unwilling or unable to help their customers get through the Sunrise process. That's still the case for .ASIA of course, but we can be a little more flexible. We can't take the registrars' place, but one of the aspects that's important to me is that we, as the validation agent, don't have to behave like a minder at the door of a jazz club saying things like: "Don't have a tie? Then you can't get in." I'd rather see us as a helper saying: "Don't have a tie? Well here's one you can use to help you get in."
So your main objective is to introduce more flexibility to the .ASIA Sunrise process? We want to remain flexible and to be able to adapt as we need to. The .ASIA registry and ourselves are very keen to listen to applicants and to react to any problems they might be encountering. For example, we plan to allow people who've won a UDRP on a name but don't have exact matching trademarks to that name to request it during Sunrise 3. That would apply to any name under any suffix, as long as it went through the UDRP process. That would help the owner of, say, mycompanysucks.com to request that name under the .ASIA even though the applicant would obviously not have a corresponding trademark.
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