The Superior Court of California in Los Angeles has ruled in favor of ICANN in a lawsuit filed by domainer Bryan Tallman. The plaintiff had set forth an ambitious goal: to register every single-character domain name in the .COM gTLD, i.e., 10 digital domain names (from 0 to 9) and 23 single-letter domain names that are currently held by Verisign in registry-reserved status.
Tallman based these demands on the fact that he had previously registered single-character names in the internationalized versions of the .COM domain in Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew, such as A.קום (A.xn--9dbq2a) and 1.コム (1. xn—tckwe). Based on a loose interpretation of Verisign’s rules, Tallman believed that this gave him the right to register single-character names in the .COM domain as well, and decided to register them all at once. When his demand was denied, he brought charges against ICANN on seven counts, including unfair competition, breach of contract and fraud.
The plaintiff’s motives are clear: any of these domains could be worth millions or even tens of millions today. However, back in the 1990s, the registration of such domains was prohibited due to concerns that the existence of such domains could cause large-scale technical problems and errors. Tallman failed to become one of the lucky few who were able to register single-character .COM domain names before this decision was made (unlike, for example, Elon Musk, who successfully registered the X.com domain).
Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, ICANN presented its objections to the Superior Court of California court and, according to Domain Incite, the court found them convincing and rejected all seven charges brought by Bryan Tallman.
