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Six more new gTLD applications yanked

Kevin Murphy, November 14, 2012, Domain Registries

A further six new gTLD applications have been withdrawn from evaluation, bringing the total to 13, according to ICANN.
The identities of the newly yanked bids is not known as they’ve not yet been fully processed. Of the 13, only .and, .are, .est, .chatr, .ksb and .cialis have been named so far.
The news emerged in a presentation ICANN is set to use in its monthly webinar for applicants shortly.
The presentation also confirms that there have been no official objections filed against any applications yet.
The String Similarity Review — which will create the initial contention sets among similar strings — has been completed, ICANN also revealed, but results will not be published until a secondary review has ended.
All applications have passed the DNS Stability Review, which checks whether the string itself could cause any DNS problems, ICANN said.
This is pretty big news for the .home applicants, to name just one string. It had been suggested that .home would cause problems because it also receives a substantial amount of traffic in the root servers.
At least one major ISP I’m aware of, Britain’s BT, uses .home as a local TLD in its residential hubs.
ICANN has also revealed that some applicants have not yet cleared background screening, saying:

Initial background screening review has been completed. The background screening service provider has identified some applications where additional information is required in order to continue with the review. Applicants for these applications will be contacted soon through the CSC [Customer Service Center] to provide the additional information.

The date of the Draw for application prioritization has been confirmed as December 17.
The webinar kicks off here at 2000 UTC today.