A fight at the highest level

The liberalization of ICANN's requirements for applicants for new top-level domain names, along with the introduction of a simplified and expedited procedure for reviewing such applications, has led to the emergence of purely cybersquatter conflicts of interest.

The fact is that two or more applications for delegation of new gTLD and sTLD zones with identical names have been submitted to the relevant ICANN committee. For example, the initiative groups DotAfrica and DotConnectAfrica are battling over the .africa domain, DotBayernEV and Bayern Connect are battling over the Bavarian domain .bayern, and Unite Berlin and Dot Berlin GmbH & Co. KG are battling over .berlin.

Three companies simultaneously applied for the .nyc domain for New York City: Name.Space, dotNYC LLC, and Connecting.nyc Inc. While the battle between DotGay LLC and Dot Gay Alliance over the .gay domain stems from the squabble between the European International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth and the American DotHealth LLC over the .health domain, the conflict over .scot between Scotnom Ltd and Dot Scot Registry is rather puzzling—these two organizations should have either joined forces or applied for different names, since one of them had the idea to apply for the .sco zone.

A total of 121 applications for new top-level domain names have been submitted to ICANN. Decisions on some of these will be made this year.