Registry won’t have to block many names per TLD, but some of them are good ones.
Yesterday ICANN issued the “Alternate Path to Delegation” reports for nine of Donuts’ English language top level domain names.
If Donuts chooses to take the alternate path option to speed up delegation of these nine domain names, it will have to initially block anywhere from 194 to 5,184 second level domains. It may be able to unblock many of these after receiving a mitigation plan.
These numbers may be lower than expected, but the top level strings we’re talking about here are not the ones you’d expect to have large numbers of queries. Here are the numbers:
.voyage 3,758
.ventures 194
.singles 541
.lighting 644
.holdings 222
.guru 2826
.equipment 612
.clothing 675
.camera 5184
Even for domains like .voyage that have thousands of strings to block, most of them are unlikely to be registered in the first place. Although ICANN tried to filter out random 10 character strings that appear to by automatically generated by Chrome, 236 of the .voyage strings are 10 characters. Most of them look quite random (.wbrlmegjto) to me. All letters of the alphabet are also on the list, but registries aren’t allowed to allocate single letter domains at first anyway. (Update: One letter SLDs are allowed. I was thinking about two letter ones. There are plenty of those on the name collision list as well.) Hundreds are two letter domains that also can’t be allocated.
That said, some of the strings on the initial block list are likely to be key domains for the TLDs. For example, .singles will initially have to block adult.singles, black.singles, and even brands such as eHarmony.singles. Boys.clothing, camisole.clothing, womens.clothing, and thrift.clothing will also be blocked.
Sherwin F says
Why do these strings need to be blocked at all?
Like adult.singles, for example. Why would they need to block that?
Andrew Allemann says
@ Sherwin – someone at some point queried the string adults.singles even though it didn’t exist. Some people are concerned that corporate systems that have been set up to query non-existent domains may leak information or be compromised if these domains are allocated. It’s likely that adult.singles won’t be blocked for long because they’ll determine it won’t cause harm.
Rubens Kuhl says
There were no restrictions for single letter domains.
Andrew Allemann says
Was thinking of two character labels. Sorry.