Not only cities and administrative regions, but also forests, mountains and rivers will be among the extended list of names that cannot be used in domain names without local government permission. The GAC ICANN is working on this initiative, Domain Incite reports. In fact, such a list already exists: it was developed in the 2012 domain application round, banning gTLDs matching the names or acronyms of countries. City and region names can be used in gTLDs only after approval by governments or local authorities.
This practice has led to a number of controversies. For example, one applicant had to pay a school $100,000 in order to get Montenegro’s approval for .bar, which matches the name of the town of Bar in the country. India’s financial and industrial Tata Group still has difficulties with registering its dot-brand .tata because Morocco, which has a small region with the same name, has not given its permission so far. At the same time, GAC has refused to register .amazon, even though there is no formal administrative region or town in any country with that name, only the river.
Perhaps, the GAC decided to avoid such incidents by including the names of mountains, rivers, forests and other objects of ‘geographic significance’. However, the GAC members are not unanimous in this regard. The UK alone has some 48,000 towns plus numerous mountains, forests and rivers – the list of protected names could be endless. The GAC should more narrowly define the term ‘geographic significance’ for better results.
