ICANN only finds 4 gTLD requests too similar

First the not so surprising news: ICANN today officially found “hotels” too similar to “hoteis” (which means “hotels” in Portuguese) and they found “unicorn” too similar to “unicom”.

It’s clear that ICANN only looked very strictly for visually similar strings. At first sight, this seems to be in line with the purpose of why they were doing this exercise. They wanted to prevent criminals from being able to register a domain name that looked almost exactly the same as an other one, in order to lure visitors to their site and for example steal private or credit card information. Let’s say you trust the website www.hilton.hotels then you would probably not notice the difference if somebody pointed you to www.hilton.hoteis.

But if you look closer to the 4 requests (hotels, hoteis, unicorn and unicom), then that worry would probably not be relevant in these cases as all four TLD’s were requested as closed TLD’s, where the registry (person who filed the application) is also the only one who would register domain names under this extension. So assuming the registry itself is not collaborating in criminal activities, there shouldn’t be such a worry for these TLD’s.

What probably is more surprising, is that a request for a TLD like “hotel” wasn’t seen too similar as “hotels”, just like “auto” isn’t determined too similar to “autos”. And there are dozens of others that could cause confusion that aren’t listed. We just name a few: “bank” and “banque”, “cal” and “call”, “car” and “cars” or even “care”, “chanel” or “channel”, “charity” and “chartis”, “citi” and “city” or “citic”, “coupon” and “coupons”, “data” and “date”, “host” and “hosting”, “kinder” and “kindle”, “loan” and “loans”, “mail” and “maif”, “pet” and “pets”, “review” and “reviews” and so on.
And then we’re not even looking for similarities that maybe don’t look the same, but could still cause confusion like between “car” and “auto” or “law” and “lawyer”.

ICANN took about 8 months to come to this conclusion. When delaying the deadline for this announcement they previously mentioned that they needed to work on making the list legally defensible. They clearly did so by making the list extremely short.

But this isn’t fully over yet. There is some confusion about whether this certainly is the final list by ICANN. And most important of all: all applicants for a new TLD and all registries of existing TLD’s now have about one week to complain about other strings being too similar to their owns.