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Name collision block-lists to be published this week

Kevin Murphy, October 17, 2013, 11:35:17 (UTC), Domain Registries

ICANN will begin to publish the lists of domains that new gTLD registries must block at launch as early as this week, according to an updated name collisions plan released last night.
Registries that have already signed contracts with ICANN will be given their block-lists “before the end of this week”, ICANN said.
Registries that were not able to sign contracts because they’d been given an “uncalculated risk” categorization will now be invited, in priority order, to contracting.
The base Registry Agreement itself has been updated — unilaterally — to include provisions requiring registries to block second-level names deemed risky when they are delegated.
For each contracted gTLD, ICANN will provide what it’s calling a SLD Collision Occurrence Assessment, which will outline the steps registries need to take to mitigate their own collision risk.
It is also expected to contain a list of SLDs that have been seen on the Day In The Life Of The Internet data sets, collected from root server operators over 48-hour periods between 2006 and 2013.
Using previous years’ DITL data is news to me, and could potentially greatly expand the number of SLDs — already expected to be in the thousands in many cases — that registries are obliged to block.
“Most” new gTLD applicants are expected to be eligible for what ICANN calls an “alternative path to delegation”, in which the registry simply blocks the SLDs on an ICANN-provided list, gets delegated, and deals with the SLD Collision Occurrence Assessment at a later date.
Here’s how ICANN described the timetable for this:

For Registry Operators with executed registry agreements the Assessments and SLD lists will be posted to the specific TLD’s registry agreement page on the ICANN website. The first of these will be available before the end of this week.
In the coming weeks ICANN will post the alternative path eligibility assessments and SLD lists for all applied-for gTLDs.

In other words, if you haven’t already signed a contract there’s not yet a firm date on when you’ll find out how many — and which — names you’re expected to block, or even if you’re eligible for the alternative delegation path.

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