Refund “options” for in-limbo gTLD applicants?

ICANN may just be a matter of weeks away from giving applicants for the .mail, .corp and .home gTLDs an exit strategy from their four years in limbo.

Its board of directors on Thursday passed a resolution calling for staff to “provide options for the Board to consider to address the New gTLD Program applications for .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL by the first available meeting of the Board following the ICANN60 meeting in Abu Dhabi”.

It’s possible this means the board could consider the matter before the end of the year.

Twenty remaining applications for the three strings have been on hold since they were identified as particularly risky in August 2013.

A study showed that all three — .home and .corp in particular — already experience vast amounts of erroneous DNS traffic on a daily basis.

This is due to so-called “name collisions”, which come about when a newly delegated TLD is actually already in use on corporate or public networks.

Many companies use .corp and .mail already behind their firewalls, a practice sometimes historically encouraged by commercial technical documentation, and .home is known to be used by some ISPs in residential and business routers.

Both of these scenarios and others can lead to DNS queries spilling out onto the public internet, which could cause breakage or data leakage.

The solution for all new gTLDs delegated to date has been to wildcard the entire zone with the message “Your DNS needs immediate attention” for a period before registrations are accepted.

This has led to some new gTLDs with far less collision traffic seeing small but notable pockets of outrage when delegated — Google’s .prod (used by some as an internal shorthand for “production”) in 2014.

Studies to date have concentrated on the volume of error traffic to applied-for gTLDs, but last Thursday the ICANN board kicked off a study that will look at what the real-world impact of name collisions in .mail, .corp and .home could be.

It’s tasked the Security and Stability Advisory Committee with carrying out the study in conjunction with related groups such as the IETF.

But this is likely to take quite a long time, so the board also resolved to think up “options” for the 20 affected applications.

Could the applicants be offered a full refund, as opposed to the partial one they currently qualify for? Could there be some kind of deferment option, such as that offered to unsuccessful 2000-round applicants? Either seems possible.

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Tagged: .corp, .home, .mail, abu dhabi, ICANN, icann 60, name collisions