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.mii becomes the first new gTLD to face rejection

Kevin Murphy, March 7, 2013, 10:25:31 (UTC), Domain Registries

The applied-for new gTLD .mii is too similar to the US military gTLD .mil and will therefore be rejected by ICANN.
While many applications have been withdrawn, this is the first involuntary rejection to be announced by ICANN.
The applicant for .mii was MiTek USA, described by DI previously as the filer of the stupidest new gTLD applications of the current round.
It also applied for .connector, .mitek and .sapphire, the names of its product categories and brands.
All four of its applications will be formally rejected when ICANN publishes its Initial Evaluation results.
MiTek didn’t bother to answer the most basic questions in the new gTLD application, simply stating “TLD will not be resold. Purchased for brand protection only.” on almost every line.
The decision by the String Similarity Panel to rule .mii confusingly similar to .mil confirms what we already knew from the .hotels/.hoteis ruling — the letters I and L are confusing.
String similarity testing compares upper and lower-case letters as well as, I believe, different typefaces.


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Comments (4)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    .mii x .mil has the rightest SWORD index I’ve ever seen: 99. Some people really didn’t bothered to read the AGB. Or didn’t fear that something so similar with .mil could land black helicopters into their roof if it got approved.

  2. Acro says:

    It does not matter if the application was ‘stupid’ or wasteful. What matters is that there are dyslexic ICANN members that claim MIL and MII are confusingly similar. They pulled the same claim with the Greek IDN application for .ΕΛ stating the Greek letter lambda is confusingly similar to the (again) Greek letter alpha (A).
    Can you say ICANNT.com ?

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      Cross-script similarity is an issue more confusing than same-script similarity. With ΕΛ and EA, or .бг vs. .br , that had weight in such decision.
      mii and mil are from the same script, and the bar to get confusing was higher.

  3. Kevin Murphy says:

    Remember, they’re testing upper and lower case combinations. I would say .mil and .miI are identical in some fonts, including this one.

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