Introduction
Alan Greenberg, ALAC member from the North American Regional At-Large Organization (NARALO) ALAC Executive Committee member, and ALAC Liaison to the GNSO composed an initial draft of this Statement [PDF, 370 KB] after discussion of the topic within At-Large and on the Mailing Lists
On 11 September 2013, this statement was posted on the At-Large Confusingly Similar gTLDs Workspace.
On 13 September 2013, Olivier Crépin-Leblond, Chair of the ALAC, requested ICANN Policy Staff in support of the ALAC to send a Call for Comments on the draft Statement to all At-Large members via the ALAC Announce mailing list.
A version incorporating the comments was later posted to the aforementioned website.
The Chair of the ALAC requested that ICANN Policy Staff in support of the ALAC open a ratification vote on the Statement.
On 25 September, Staff confirmed that the online vote resulted in the ALAC endorsing the Statement with 12 votes in favor, 1 vote against, and 0 abstentions. You may review the result independently under: http://www.bigpulse.com/pollresults?code=3415IQqMrbPLrWdGyYeN5b5F
Summary
- The ALAC advises the Board to revisit the issue of new TLD strings, which are singular and plural versions of the same word, and ensure that ICANN does not delegate strings that are virtually certain to create confusion among Internet users and therefore result in loss of faith in the DNS.
- The ALAC advises the Board to review the objection decision system with multiple panels that leads to inconsistency and not only review the obvious case of .cam/.com where conflicting objection decisions have forced such review;
- The ALAC advises the Board to determine a viable way forward which will not create unwarranted contention sets nor delegate multiple TLDs destined to ensure user confusion and implicit loss of faith in the DNS.