Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

ICANN blocks almost 10 million new gTLD domains

Kevin Murphy, November 18, 2013, 17:08:45 (UTC), Domain Registries

ICANN has asked new gTLD registry operators to block a total of 9.8 million domain names, due to the perceived risk of damage from name collisions.
To put it another way, Verisign has managed to take close to 10 million domain names off the market.
ICANN today delivered second-level domain block-lists for 1,327 new gTLDs. Combined, the number of unique blocked domains is just over 9.8 million, according to DI’s preliminary analysis.
Some of the lists relate to gTLDs that will not be approved because they’re in mutually exclusive contention sets with other strings (for example, .unicorn and .unicom).
Twenty-five unfortunate gTLD applicants did not receive lists, because ICANN said they do not qualify for the block-list-based “Alternate Path to Delegation”.
We’re currently crunching the numbers and will have more information later today, with a bit of luck.


Lorem ipsum

Tagged: , ,

Comments (6)

  1. M says:

    When will ICANN publish the process for applicants that don’t want to participate in the APD? How much of a delay are strings that won’t take the APD are looking at?

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      Not sure. First quarter 2014 would be my guess.

      • Rubens Kuhl says:

        Q1 2014 is what is foreseen for the framework. Although Francisco Arias said it will be quick to apply the framework to get actual mitigation plans, considering there are more than 1,000 uncontested TLDs and this number is growing due to private auctions and settlements, I would be conservative and guessing at least a month for going from the framework to the ~1,400 mitigation plans.

  2. Acro says:

    I find the blocking of visually similar TLDs ridiculous. So according to your unicorn/unicom example, is .corn blocked too, because it can be confused somehow for .com? If one is visually impaired, they should be using text to voice software, eliminating this ridiculous ‘confusion’.

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      Yeah, I’m pretty certain that .corn would be banned based on the .unicorn/.unicom decision. I wouldn’t risk the application fee, anyway.

  3. steve machin says:

    so.. having reviewed the list for our applied for string, tickets, the list of 1847 blocked SLDs has to be some kind of joke. as expected a lot of the names are simply search terms that the search function in the browser added a dot to… congratulations verisign #slowclap

Add Your Comment