Three of the largest applicants for new TLDs are facing a mountain of objections.

Donuts, Amazon, and Google have the dubious honor of having the most objected-to applications for new top level domains.

There were 263 formal objections to new top level domains, and that doesn’t include GAC advice.

Donuts received 55 objections covering 45 unique objections, which means about one out of seven of its 307 applications are facing an objection.

24 of Donuts’ objections are community objections. Groups purporting to represent the gold, band, and ski, among other “communities”, decided to fight the company.

Amazon received 24 objections on 18 unique applications. Half of the 24 objections are community objections, thanks in part of the company’s plans to keep its TLDs closed.

Google, which applied for more domains than Amazon, was hit with 22 objections on 18 unique objections. 9 are community objections and 7 are legal rights objections.

The “our competitors ganged up on us” winner is Fidelity, which applied for only four top level domains but managed to receive 11 objections. Only its .Fidelity application wasn’t objected to. Its .IRA, .MutualFunds, and .Retirement applications received multiple objections from a combination of TIAA-CREF, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and Prudential.

The spreadsheet below lists each objection and “decodes” subsidiaries to show applicants such as Donuts. It is sorted by applicant.

Google’s spam page claims parked domains are web spam.

Here’s something interesting to start your week.

Google has a page about “Fighting Spam” referring to pages designed to trick search engines such as cloaking and hidden text.

Listed right there underneath “Types of Spam” is this:

It’s completely understandable that Google doesn’t want to index parked domains. But to label them as spam? I take two issues with that.

1. In order to be web spam, the creator of the page should be trying to game Google to get the page indexed. Domain parkers don’t do that. They used to, but now we know our pages aren’t going to show up in Google, and there’s nothing the big players are doing to parked pages to try to circumvent that.

2. If a parked page is inherently spam, then Google powers a big chunk of spam. It’s Google ads that power over half of parked domains.

(Thanks Joe Politzer)

Google registered domain names yesterday for an “Open Patent Pledge”.

When Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, it was clear that a big reason for its purchase was Motorola’s patent portfolio.

Now it looks like the company might be getting ready to make some sort of “Open Patent Pledge”, although what that actually is remains to be seen.

Yesterday the company registered OpenPatentPledge.com (and .net/.org) as well as OpnPledge.com. (It couldn’t register OpenPledge.com, which is owned by a company in South Korea.)

Perhaps this is related to Paul Graham’s idea of a Patent Pledge of “No first use of software patents against companies with less than 25 people.” Or maybe it’s like IBM’s open source patent pledge. Another idea is it’s related to its FRAND proposal for licensing Motorola patents.

We’re likely to find out soon.

Internet Traffic asks customers to identify themselves as part of new Google initiative.

One of the topics discussed extensively in the hallways at Webfest this year was changes Google is making to its parking program.

Although I don’t have all of the details, the bottom line is that Google is making an effort to better identify who is actually parking domains using its ad feed. This may involve steps to identify people across the various parking companies that use Google.

Today Internet Traffic customers saw what appears to be the first sign of these changes.

The company sent an email to customers asking them to agree to a couple terms and provide detailed contact information.

The terms are basic and are already in all parking companies’ terms: that you won’t click on ads on any of your domains and won’t provide incentives for others to click.

I’m not sure how this will be implemented across the different parking companies, but you can expect to see some of the results of these changes in the coming months. And my understanding is that there are other parts of this initiative that you won’t see.

Group claims three TLDs would give Google an unfair competitive advantage.

A consortium that promotes competition in search has filed objections against three of Google’s top level domain bids.

Robin Wauters with The Next Web was the first to write about the objections this morning.

FairSearch filed objections with International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) over .search, .fly, and .map. ICC is one of three dispute resolutions providers hearing new TLD objections. ICC handles objections related to Limited Public Interest and Community Objections.

In a post on its web site, FairSearch says that awarding these TLDs to Google would allow it to “gain an unfair competitive advantage against other members of this community through the improper grant of a perpetual monopoly of generic industry terms to a single company.”

A quick look at FairSearch’s member companies will explain why it is opposed to .fly. The first five listed companies all compete in the online travel business and are already concerned about Google’s acquisition of ITA Software and how Google handles flight searches.

Other FairSearch backers include Oracle, Nokia, and search rival Microsoft.