ICANN Will Not Delegate .Mail, .Home and .Corp Due to Name Collisions, Offers Refunds

February 9, 2018

ICANN’s board has eventually passed an inevitable resolution confirming that it will not delegate the .mail, .home and .corp strings as part of 2012 round of new top level domain name expansion, and has authorized a full refund for companies that applied for these strings.

The strings were shelved due to concerns about name collisions. Lots of internal networks used these extensions, and setting them live in the DNS could cause issues.

While other strings also had issues of name collisions, they were not at the level of these three strings.

Part of the resolution reads,

Whereas, in August 2013, ICANN organization, in conjunction with the study, sought broad community participation in the development of a solution, and a draft mitigation plan was published for public comment along with the report by Interisle. The draft mitigation plan cited .HOME and .CORP as high-risk strings, proposing not to delegate these two strings.

Whereas, on 30 July 2014, the ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee adopted the Name Collision Management Framework. In the Framework, .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL were noted as high-risk strings whose delegation should be deferred indefinitely.

Whereas, the ICANN Board does not intend to delegate the strings .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL in the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program.

Whereas, the Board considered that the applicants were not aware before the application window that the strings .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL would be identified as high-risk, and that the delegations of such high-risk strings would be deferred indefinitely.

Resolved (2018.02.04.12), the Board directs the President and CEO, or his designee(s), that the applications for .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL should not proceed and, to account for the unforeseen impact to application processing, the Board directs the President and CEO to, upon withdrawal of the remaining applications for .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL, provide the applicants a full refund of the New gTLD Program application fee of $185,000.

This comes as a classic example that ICANN will have to do a better research and forecast to mitigate such unintended risks given the applicants may have invested hugely in making their applications ready.

Terminated Domains

McDonalds joined a host of companies that had applied for their .brand top level domain names and later have decided it’s not worth the expense or effort. “The restaurant chain applied to run the .McDonalds and .MCD top level domain names, but it recently sent termination notices (pdf) to domain name overseer ICANN voluntarily relinquishing the two domains.

Other The 10 brand domain names in the termination list are .naspers, .payu, .supersport, .mzansimagic, .mnet, .kyknet, .africamagic, .multichoice, .dstv and .gotv.