My, my… We are venturing into the
theatre of the absurd. One wonders who gave the “international
expert panel” their brief? This cannot stand or, indeed, Steve, the
damage will be vastly more far reaching than a poor reflection on ICANN.
Kind regards,
RA
Ronald N. Andruff
From:
owner-bc-gnso@icann.org [mailto:owner-bc-gnso@icann.org] On Behalf Of Steve DelBianco
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 6:50
PM
To: bc - GNSO list
Subject: [bc-gnso] Update:
Contention sets for new gTLDs
Wanted you all to see
this. I think it will reflect poorly on ICANN's expansion of TLDs.
ICANN hired an international
expert panel to scour 1900 new TLD strings and determine which were confusingly
similar, so they could be combines in the same contention set.
This is to ensure we
don't delegate 2 TLD strings that would confuse Internet users because they are
too similar. I expected, for example, that the applications received for
.hotel and .hotels would be in the same contention set, since it would be
confusing for users to have both TLDs out there. (It would increase the
cost of defensive registrations, too, since hotels would have to buy domains in
both TLDs. )
After several months
of careful study, ICANN's experts published their contention sets yesterday. (link)