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The plurals debate is over as ICANN delegates 17 more new gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, December 18, 2013, Domain Policy

Another 17 new gTLDs were delegated to the DNS root last night, most of them belonging to Donuts.
Notably, Donuts now runs .photos and .careers, the first two delegated gTLDs where live applications also exist for the singular form of the string.
Uniregistry is currently contracted and awaiting the delegation of .photo, while dotCareer is already contracted for .career.
The debate about whether ICANN should permit singular and plural versions of the same string to coexist is now surely over.
Just a week ago, the Internet Association — a trade group comprising Amazon, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Salesforce, Zynga and many others — called on ICANN to rethink its policy of coexistence.
Calling the policy a “violation of user trust”, the Association said (pdf), “the existence of these domain names poses significant risks to the DNS, Internet companies, and their users”.
The Association noted that the Governmental Advisory Committee had strong concerns about singular and plural coexistence, due to the risk of consumer confusion.
String Confusion Objection panels have reached quite different conclusions about whether adding an “s” makes a string confusingly similar to another.
Personally, while I’m all for competition, I believe coexistence will lead to parasitical business models that will bring the domain name industry into further disrepute.
I know for a fact that some registries are considering the merits of tailgating their confusingly similar competitors.
But it seems ICANN’s decision was final.
There’s currently no mechanism for ICANN to un-approve a gTLD once it’s been delegated — failing serious wrongdoing by the registry — so it’s difficult to see how it could now decide that plural and singular forms of the same string should be mutually exclusive.
While I’m sure the Internet Association and others will carry on complaining, I think they’re now talking to deaf ears.
There were 17 new gTLDs delegated yesterday in total, 15 of which were in Donuts portfolio.
Donuts has also added the following to its portfolio: .cab, .camp, .academy, .center, .company, .computer, .domains, .limo, .management, .recipes, .shoes, .systems and .viajes (Spanish for “travel”).
CONAC, the China Organizational Name Administration Center had .政务 (“government”) and .公益 (“public interest”) delegated.