ICANN has published a document on its official website that the long-term dispute over the fate of the new gTLD .HOTEL has ended. This story lasts even longer than the litigation over the long-suffering .WEB, although it may not be as loud. Several companies were vying for the .HOTEL domain, and it was going to auction. However, the HOTEL Top-Level-Domain (HTLD) registry managed to avoid it and received the right to manage the domain zone through the Community Priority Evaluation procedure.
This procedure, which was in effect during the first stage of the new generic top-level domain program, initially seemed quite dubious and caused a lot of criticism. Its meaning is that the registry received rights to the domain if it could prove that it significantly represented the interests of the community to which the domain was addressed. In the case of the .HOTEL, we are obviously talking about a community of hoteliers, the very fact of whose existence is, to put it mildly, not obvious. However, ICANN found HTLD's arguments to be sufficiently compelling.
Other applicants disagreed with this decision and initiated an Independent Review Process in 2015. It ended in favor of ICANN, but opponents soon launched a new one. Among other claims, their complaint included references to a long-standing scandal when, due to a software failure at ICANN, third parties could gain access to confidential information of domain applicants, which HTLD representatives allegedly took advantage of. The losing parties even tried to file a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, but it was not accepted because a mandatory condition for accepting a domain application was a covenant not to sue.
Apparently, this story has finally reached its final point. According to Domain Name Wire, Fegistry, Radix and Domain Venture Partners, which continued to challenge ICANN's decision, officially abandoned their claims, and the complaint was closed without the possibility of renewal.
