new gTLD’s will be delayed due to “Name Collisions”

We earlier reported a recent study revealed that lots of internet traffic goes to domain name extensions that do not (yet) exist. ICANN has now made a report available on how they plan to handle this situation and minimise the impact new gTLD’s will have on systems that currently rely on certain domain names to simply not work.The different new gTLD’s requested, have been put into 3 different categories: High risk, Low Risk and Uncalculated Risk. The categorisation is made based on the volume of traffic that currently already goes to that TLD and on information about SSL-certificate made out for local domains under such TLD.

Only two extensions ended up in the “High risk” category: .home and .corp. The chances of either of these two going live any time soon are very low. ICANN will only release such a TLD if the applicant can proof that no risk is involved. The earlier study which is the basis of these new rules however already states that there is no easy way to overcome the risks for these TLD’s.

The majority of TLD’s ended up on the “Low risk” category: 1138 of them. These include all IDN extensions and also for example .vlaanderen, .brussels, .amsterdam and .hotels. While these are seen as “low risk”, ICANN still does demand a reasonably amount of extra work from the future registries before they are allowed to start delegating domain names. First of all there needs to be a minimum of 120 days between the signing of the registry contract and the delegation of any domain name in the new TLD. This will delay the first TLD to go live with at least over one month. With the first contract having been signed on July 15’th, no domain name may be delegated before November 11’th (earlier ICANN announced Oktober 5’th as the start). This however doesn’t mean sunrises can’t already start earlier. Domain names may already be registered but may not be activated technically. This will certainly mean some registries will now want to rush into getting their contract signed for the 120 days to start counting, as only a small amount of registries already hold a signed contract in their hands.
Next to that extra delay, there also is lots of work to do for the new registries. At some point the TLD will be activated in the root nameservers. This may already be done before the end of the 120 day period mentioned earlier. From that day on, a 30 day period starts in which no domain names may be activated but during which all requests received for domain names under the future TLD needs to be monitored and the networks or nameserver providers from whom the requests originated need to be contacted asking to resolve this issue. How well this will work with the vast amount of users who use a third party recursive nameserver either from their internet connection provider or public nameservers like google’s is still to see.

And then there is the category called “uncalculated risk”. This holds 279 potential new TLD’s, including for example .hotel, .cisco, .google, .fashion,… ICANN is going to conduct further studies into the risk involved and plans to categorise all these TLD’s as either “high risk” or “low risk” within 3 to 6 months. This will probably delay extensions like .energy or .city which might otherwise have been with the first new gTLD’s in Latin script.