17 November 2013
ICANN has published the Alternate Path to Delegation Reports and lists of Second-Level Domains (SLDs) to block for all eligible proposed new gTLDs. Nearly all of the applied for new gTLD strings have been found eligible to proceed with the Alternate Path to Delegation prior to receiving their Name Collision Occurrence Assessments.
The Alternate Path to Delegation was outlined in the board New gTLD Program Committee document titled "New gTLD Name Collision Occurrence Management Plan" [PDF, 840 KB]. The reports determine whether applicants of a specific applied-for string are eligible to elect the Alternate Path to Delegation. The accompanying lists detail the SLDs that must be blocked for each proposed new gTLD to mitigate the occurrence of name collision. Only proposed new gTLDs that are eligible for the Alternate Path to Delegation have a list of SLDs to block.
Download the Alternate Path to Delegation Reports and Lists of SLDs to block for all proposed new gTLDs [ZIP, 53.9 MB].
The minority of new gTLDs not eligible for the Alternate Path to Delegation (25) will not proceed to delegation until they receive their corresponding Name Collision Occurrence Assessment for their respective new gTLD and ICANN has determined that the new gTLD is eligible for delegation. Mitigation measures required by ICANN as a condition to activation of names in the DNS zone for such new gTLDs may include, without limitation, mitigation measures such as those described in Section 3.2 of the New gTLD Name Collision Occurrence Management Plan. The process for producing these assessments, known as the "Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework," is currently in development. The Framework will be a joint effort between ICANN and the community. ICANN expects to finalize the Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework by ICANN 49 in Singapore (23-27 March 2014).
ICANN intends to present a development timeline and initial questions for discussion regarding the Framework at ICANN 48 Buenos Aires (17-21 November 2013). Interested parties (e.g., current and prospective Registry Operators, security practitioners, community members) are encouraged to attend the SSR Session on Monday, 18 November 2013 and provide input.
The Alternate Path to Delegation requires blocking the known list of SLDs that have received queries in the "Day in the Life of the Internet" (DITL) and other relevant data. The gTLDs that were considered ineligible were those for which the growth of the number of SLDs queried year over year significantly exceeded the average growth rate for all applied for gTLDs in at least two of the DITL years (2006-2012), and for which one of the years in which this was observed was the most recent year, 2012. The analysis of this data showed that for some strings, the variance of SLDs queried varied so significantly from year to year that the mechanism of blocking SLDs might not be an effective way of addressing the name collision issue.
Per New gTLD Program Committee direction, both home and corp will be deferred for delegation indefinitely and thus were not included in this analysis.
The following 25 proposed gTLDs have been found to be ineligible for the Alternate Path to Delegation:
blog
box
business
casa
cisco
comcast
dev
family
free
google
iinet
mail
network
office
orange
philips
prod
sfr
site
taobao
taxi
web
work
world
zip
(Note: This announcement was updated on 18 November 2013 with the list of the 25 proposed gTLDs found to be ineligible for the Alternate Path to Delegation.)