ICANN have published an update on the search for their new CEO to replace Fadi Chehad̩. There have been well over 100 applications to date. Of these applicants 93% are male and 7% are female. They come from the following regions Р9% from Africa, 16% from Asia, 27% from Europe, 7% from Latin America and the Caribbean and 41% from North America.

Due to the volume of applications “the committee is therefore moving somewhat more slowly in its deliberations, in order to assure that the decisions made are in the interests of obtaining a CEO that is best suited to leading ICANN.”

“The committee has begun the interviewing process and will continue for the next couple of months. It is striving to come to a set of recommendations before the end of the year.”

The when and sometimes what form applications will take for new gTLDs has been the subject of frequent discussion. And Google has “thrown its weight behind the latter, urging ICANN to abandon the concept of application rounds” according to a report in the World Trademark Review.

According to the report, domains policy manager Stephanie Duchesneau, writing on behalf of Google Registry, “urges ICANN to abandon the concept of application rounds in favour of a continuous process, with strings allocated on a first­come, first­served basis. While noting that one additional round may be necessary to process any existing gTLD contentions, she argues that a continuous window would help lessen the burden associated with such application processes as string contention and objections, and would avoid the “rush, inefficiency and missed deadlines” that characterised the current round.”

“For businesses she identifies the key advantages as increased predictability and the ability to develop more robust processes ‘because they will have the flexibility to apply to operate a TLD once use cases and initial plans had been fully developed, rather than being rushed to submit applications within a set timeframe’. The number of withdrawals would then likely fall and repeats of the ‘current delays associated with execution of the ICANN Registry Agreement, delegation and commercial rollout would be minimised as applicants could submit their applications at the point that they were confident of their own timelines for launching a TLD’”.

Verisign have published the latest of its ten trending keywords for .com and .net in October. For .com the top ten keywords for the month were OK, walk, storage, mortgage, visit, blab, crowd, sold, christmas and marijuana. For .net the top keywords were China, training, wang, books, Nike, print, yuan, Canada, xiao and supply.