[jeffmould]

To be blunt, this is a horrible roll-out by Google. It is a perfect example of the right hand not talking to the left hand, or the rest of the body for that matter. Several significant issues:

1) The announcement is made by Google, yet Google is not accepting EAP registrations. Very confusing.

2) The registrars accepting EAP are not as widely known as you would expect for something like this, meaning that I am going to have to pay to registrar now and then a transfer fee to transfer to my primary register down the road.

3) GoDaddy is listed as an EAP registrar, however, they are only accepting pre-registrations at this time. On top of that, they found a way to be even more shady by charging a $173.99 for "Priority Pre-Registration".

[CydeWeys]

The right hand cannot talk to the left hand in this case, however. It's a complicated space to operate in. Start here if you're a policy wonk: https://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/gac-board-regi...

Whether registrars support EAP, and how they implement it, is entirely up to each registrar. If you have complaints about any specific registrar practices, or about registrars not supporting it full stop, then those should be directed at the registrar in question.

[grepthisab]

The complaint is against Google, not any particular domain registrar, to be fair. At first glance it seems like you’ve botched this roll out for the (preventable) reasons mentioned above. Wordpress, although I didn’t agree with some choices they made when doing it, did a wonderful job rolling out the dot blog TLD, as a counterpoint.

[CydeWeys]

We literally cannot coordinate anything between the registry and registrar though. I agree with you that we (the registry) could have done a better job on our marketing website in making it clearer which registrars offer support for which phases, but beyond that? Not sure.

[bigiain]

The $173 is a "Phase 7 Pre Registration", for the low low just for you price of $16,000 you can have a Phase 1 Priority Registration!

They're just auctioning off all the good names - same as every other domain squatting rent seeker...