IRP (Independent Review Process) is an appellate court where decisions concerning new domains delegation made by ICANN can be appealed. It has come up with the verdict on the appeal of booking.com. The appeal was filed a year ago after ICANN commission that deals with string confusion decisions ruled that domains .HOTELS and .HOTEIS are too confusingly similar and decided that only one of them can be delegated.
Booking.com is the only applicant for the .HOTELS domain, the only applicant for .HOTEIS is Despegar Online. (The word hoteis means hotels in Portuguese). The decision made by the commission is very logical in comparison with some other decisions that the commission made. .HOTELS and .HOTEIS actually do look very similar in the address bar of the browser which can confuse the user. However, Booking.com tried to appeal not the decision by the process how it was made. The complaint to the appellate court read that the decisions concerning string confusion were not transparent, there were not clearly defined criteria and sometimes they even violated ICANN regulations.
Having considered the complaint, IRP panel confirmed the correctness of ICANN’s decision and decided that domains .HOTELS and .HOTEIS are too confusingly similar to co-exist online. However, the IRP panel recognized the validity of some of the booking.com’s claims. The panel agreed that the process of determining string confusion should be more transparent and fair. As a result IRP panel made a rather unexpected decision. According to the accepted practice, the lost party pays the costs for the complaint consideration. However, this time IRP panel ruled that these expenses, $163 thousand, should be divided equally between booking.com that lost and ICANN that won.
Regarding the domains themselves, now Booking.com and Despegar Online will have to participate in an auction to find out which domain will be added to the root zone.
