The ICANN Board of Directors has voted to cancel the restriction concerning two-letter domains in new general top-level domains. The Board also instructed ICANN’s executives to “develop and implement an efficient procedure” for the release of two-character domains.
The existing ICANN regulations do not allow two-letter domains because they could potentially be confused with two-letter country code top-level domains. However, the Governmental Advisory Committee said at the 51st ICANN meeting, which recently ended in Los Angeles, that there is no danger of such confusion. The committee cited UK.COM and US.COM as examples, as these so far have caused no problems related to the similarity of the strings.
Still, GAC insists that ICANN should inform it on a case-by-case basis of registrars’ requests to register two-letter domains in new gTLDs.
