ICANN has informed new gTLD applicants that four out of almost 2,000 applications for new gTLDs will require government backing. The domains in question are .tata, .bar and .tui, which appear to be similar to geographic names.
Two applicants applied for .bar as a mass-market TLD, but it appeared there's a municipality called “Bar” in Montenegro. Tata Group, an Indian corporation, applied for .tata, while “Tata” is also a province of Morocco. Also, TUI AG, a major European travel group, wanted to use .tui as a dot-brand, while Tui is also a province in Burkina Faso.
The Geographic Names Panel had to rule which proposed strings count as geographic names and which don't, according to ISO 3166 list. It is worth mentioning that some strings that are similar to the names in the list passed the panel approval without any problems – namely .delta, .est and .capital, which correspondingly match regions of Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Denmark.
Also, the panel produced a list of six gTLD strings that had been initially applied for as geographic, but were ruled out as not geographic. These include .frl, .ist, .ryukyu, .scot, .vegas and .zulu, none of which appear on protected names lists.
