.city

Status:	Proposed
Type:	Generic
Category:	Culture
More information:

.city is a proposed new TLD in ICANN's New gTLD Program.

Citigroup, applicant for .citi, has filed several comments with ICANN claiming that .citi and .city are not confusingly similar. In several past UDRP cases, however, Citigroup has argued that the two words are confusingly similar, and won, leading to the suspension of domain names using "city" in a manner similar to Citigroup trademarks.

Current Applicant

1. Donuts (Snow Sky, LLC), filed for 307 new gTLDs, each via its own LLC. The company has partnered with Demand Media to provide back-end registry solutions. This applicant submitted a Public Interest Commitment, which can be downloaded here.

Previous Applicants

1. Radix (Dot City Inc.), .city is one of 31 applications submitted by Radix, which has partnered with ARI Registry Services to provide its backend registry services.
2. TLD Registry Limited, Michael Lerer, Project Manager of Sedari is the contact person of the applicant.

Private Auction Resolves Contention

Both Radix and TLD Registry withdrew their applications after an April 2014 private auction that was administered by Applicant Auction, in which Donuts won the rights to the string.

GAC Warning

All applicants for the .city TLD were issued a GAC Early Warning; The warning system is noted as a strong recommendation on behalf of national governments to the ICANN Board that a given TLD application should be denied. Germany issued warnings to all three applicants, while Australia issued warnings to only Dot City Inc. (Radix), and Donuts' Snow Sky, LLC application. Presumably the Australian representative believes that the third applicant, TLD Registry Limited has enumerated sufficient steps to protect geographic names at the second level, given that the other two complaints note this lack of protection as the reason for objection.

Radix received a GAC Early Warning as an entire applicant, where each one of the applicants was flagged by the U.S. Government. This seems to be the only time a portfolio applicant had all of their applications warned. The issue does not deal with the technical capabilities or thematic content of their applications, but rather the inclusion of an email address associated with the US' Federal Bureau of Investigation. It seems that Radix included correspondence with this address as a recommendation with each of their applications.

Top-Level Domain

Governmental Advisory Committee. Considers and provides advice on the activities of ICANN as they relate to concerns of governments, particularly matters where there may be an interaction between ICANN's policies and various laws and international agreements or where they may affect public policy issues (ICANN Bylaws).