.Cam and Amazon IDN domain name decisions will be reviewed.
ICANN is giving two new top level domain name applications another look after embarrassing inconsistencies in string confusion objections.
The board’s new TLD committee determined that decisions against Amazon.com’s .通販 application and Rightside’s .cam should be reviewed.
I provide the background to this story in detail here.
In the case of .cam, Verisign succeeded in a string confusion objection against Rightside’s .cam, but failed against two other .cam applicants. The same thing happened when Google, applicant for .car, filed objections against .cars. It won two cases and lost the other.
In the case of .cam, this means that Rightside’s application would be thrown out. In the case of .cars, one .cars application would be in contention with Google’s .car and the other two applications wouldn’t. This created some very interesting contention sets that would have been difficult to resolve via the “last resort” contention set process.
Since then, the .cars applicant that lost the objection brought by Google has settle its .cars contention set and withdrawn its applications. This means there’s no longer a contention set between Google’s .car and the applicant’s .cars. Google will get .car, and one of the two companies that originally survived its string confusion objections will get to run .cars.
Now a review panel will re-evalute the result of Verisign’s .cam objection against Rightside.
This is bad news for competing .cam applicants Famous Four Media and AC Webconnecting Holding B.V. Depending on the re-evaluation, their contention set could return to a three-way race.
Adding fuel to the fire, Famous Four had pointed out that Rightside previously objected to consolidation of the .cam objections by saying that each applicant could make a different defense, and thus the results could be different.
Interestingly, ICANN set also set up a review of the objection against Amazon.com’s application for .通販.
This was one of themost bizarre string confusion decisions. The objection was filed by a .shop applicant. The domains are in different scripts and actually mean something different, with Amazon’s domain name meaning “online shopping”.
I was under the impression that ICANN wasn’t going to give this objection another chance. When it decided it would consider the .cam/.com and .car/.cars issue, it rationalized out any other inconsistencies and specifically .通販.
If the panel decides the .通販 objection was improperly decided, .通販 will no longer be in a contention set with one of the .shop applications. This would probably be good for both Amazon and the .shop applicant; it’s one less contention set for both of them.
You can expect the guidelines for string confusion objections to be completely re-written in the guidebook for the next round of new TLDs.
[The initial version of this story implied that Amazon.com’s application was dead because of the objection. This is incorrect; it was merely placed into a contention set with the objector’s .shop application.]
.car and .cars are a bad idea, but if they are already allowing single / plural TLDs, I don’t see a problem.
To me .cam is even worse… because people like me who need reading glasses will see most print ads as .com.
Only Rightside’s .cam is rising up from the dead. The other decision was a confusion between applicants, so they were put in a contention set, not thrown out.
You’re correct. I’ve clarified the story.