Not all .cam requests are equal (some are more similar to .com than others)

We earlier reported about .car and .cars being found not too similar while .pet and .pets were found too similar. Today an other weird decision has been filed in the String Contentions Sets. One request for .cam has been found to be too similar to the existing TLD .com. Nothing too weird, there is something to say for the fact that they look and sound reasonably similar. And their targeted audiences will most probably overlap. But there were a total of 3 requests for .cam and for the other 2 the similarity had already been examined and they where found not confusingly similar with .com.

Whether .com and .cam are too similar can certainly be food for discussion. But it is rather clear that .cam and .cam are the same. On top of that, the different applicants all intended to use the .cam extension in the same way. So the extra confusion can’t have arisen from the meaning or usage of the new extension.

ICANN however outsourced the decision making about such string similarity to different specialised parties. And this last .cam similarity case was decided upon by somebody else. Because the rules for similarity set forward by ICANN are rather vague, the outcome of a judgement largely depends on the judge and less on the rules. Demand Media, de applicant whose .cam request was torpedoed by this decision, is now demanding the rules for such string similarity to be revised.