Elisa Cooper the Chair of the ICANN Business Constituency has told ICANN (again) not to allow singular and plural’s strings of the same word.
The letter dated December 30, 2013 was just published yesterday on ICANN’ site yesterday.
We at TheDomains.com previously stated that allowing singular and plural strings of the same word i.e. .car and .cars was going to be a huge mess and was one of the top policy mistakes ICANN made in the new gTLD program.
Of course the problem has gotten worse as some panels of the International Center for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) have dismissed challenges to plural and singular as being similarly confusing whiles other have upheld objections to them in other strings
Here is the letter:
New gTLD Program Committee:
We urge you to take immediate action to avoid the significant problems of allowing both singular and plural forms of the same TLD string.
Fortunately, the ICANN Board has just created a precedent for taking a “second look” at string confusion decisions, as we explain below.
First, consider the obvious problem of allowing a single travel company to control .hotels while another applicant had met Community priority for the .hotel TLD – a result that would discredit the Community Priority program that all of us at ICANN supported.
Another troubling example is to allow both .car and .cars TLDs, since registrants and users would likely be confused as to which domain they heard in an advertisement. The .car / .cars situation is especially problematic since conflicting decisions by the International Center for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) undermine the credibility of ICANN’s gTLD program.
The Business Constituency (BC) wrote you in October to describe these troubling inconsistencies in string confusion decisions by the ICDR. (see Exhibit B for letter). As seen in the timeline below, the first three string confusion decisions went against the objector, followed by 5 decisions for the objector. Then another decision (.cars) went against the objector, followed by another decision against the objector.
This inconsistency in decisions on precisely the same issue should be adequate justification to revisit all of the objections regarding string confusion between singular and plural forms of the same TLD, and certainly at least the very proceedings where the inconsistencies occurred. In its October letter, the BC suggested two ways the NGPC could proceed:
First, we request that ICANN publish any evidence considered by expert panels, arbitration providers, and ICANN staff in its evaluation of these decisions.
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