Fadi Chehade, ICANN’s CEO, has announced that on April 23rd 2013 the first new gTLD’s will be approved. After months of waiting, there’s now a first concrete date regarding those new extensions.

‘We have made a great progress the past few weeks regarding the new gTLD’s and this made that we’ll be able to approve the first new extensions on April 23rd 2013,’ says Chehade. Although he immediately added that there could occur things they can’t control which may cause this date to slip. ‘However it will only be a slippage of a few days or weeks, definitely not months,’ Chehade said.

The news was a big surprise for many people in the Internet industry since ICANN always tended to delay the release of the new gTLD’s. By putting April 23rd 2013 as the date for the first approval ICANN is now facing a tight deadline. Moreover the findings of the ‘String Similarity Panel’ will only be published on March 1st 2013. They checked which gTLD’s would or wouldn’t be appropriate for approval by verifying the similarity between all applications. There can’t be any confusion between the several new extensions or between the new extensions and the already existing ccTLD’s. Their findings will be announced on March 1st 2013.

Previously ICANN already announced that the window for filing objections against applications will be closed on March 13th 2013. This means that people who don’t agree with the findings of the String Similarity Panel will only have a few working days to file their objections.

We’ll now have to wait how many objections there will be filed against the findings of the panel and how much attention ICANN will give to those objections in order to see just how ‘fixed’ the date of April 23rd 2013 will be.

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