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These are the top 50 name collisions

Kevin Murphy, November 19, 2013, 23:01:37 (UTC), Domain Tech

Having spent the last 36 hours crunching ICANN’s lists of almost 10 million new gTLD name collisions, the DI PRO collisions database is back online, and we can start reporting some interesting facts.
First, while we reported yesterday that 1,318 new gTLD applicants will be asked to block a total of 9.8 million unique domain names, the number of distinct second-level strings involved is somewhat smaller.
It’s 6,806,050, according to our calculations, still a bewilderingly high number.
The most commonly blocked string, as expected, is “www”. It’s on the block-lists for 1,195 gTLDs, over 90% of the total.
Second is “2010”. I currently have no explanation for this, but I’m wondering if it’s an artifact of the years of Day In The Life data upon which ICANN based its lists.
Protocol-related strings such as “wpad” and “isatap” also rank highly, as do strings matching popular TLDs such as “com”, “org”, “uk” and “de”. Single-character strings are also very popular.
The brand with the most blocks (free trademark protection?) is unsurprisingly Google.
The string “google” appears as an exact match on 930 gTLDs’ lists. It appears as a substring of 1,235 additional blocked strings, such as “google-toolbar” and “googlemaps”.
Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, YouTube and Hotmail also feature in the top 100 blocked brands.
DI PRO subscribers can search for strings that interest them, discovering how many and which gTLDs they’re blocked in, using the database.
Here’s a table of the top 50 blocked strings.
[table id=22 /]


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Comments (3)

  1. Acro says:

    One has more chances of colliding with a gTLD at application time, than with an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Or, Uranus.

  2. Andrew says:

    I wonder what this means for naming conventions for .brand websites. One theory was that .brand owners would use http://www.brand as their main address if they switched to .brand. Now they’ll have to work through their mitigation plan before doing this.
    I have no idea how complex or time consuming the mitigation plans will be.

  3. Reg says:

    I do not envy you the task of going through all that. Thanks for doing it!

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