2012 Domain Dunce: fresh TLD applicants

Many firms made big screw-ups on their $185k TLD applications.

Fresh top level domain applications are long. They are tedious. They are (mostly) boring.

Still, some applicants made some huge errors on their applications.

Consider VeriSign, which messed up its transliteration of .com in Hebrew. As stated by IDN experts, the string VeriSign submitted would take 7 keystrokes instead of the intended 3. For one of the characters, you’d have to type a character, then switch to CAPS, Hit Shift, then the minus sign, then switch back from CAPS.

DotConnectAfrica made a huge mistake, too. It applied for .dotAfrica instead of .Africa.

Fortunately, ICANN created a process to update applications and fix certain errors. Both VeriSign and DotConnectAfrica have fixed their errors.

So far 386 change requests have been submitted and 29 approved. Most change requests weren’t errors; they are just changes to contacts and addresses.

But some big errors still exist. I’m not sure if Kerry Logistics has submitted a change request yet, but it ought to. It misspelled logistics in its string.

If Kerry neglects to fix it, perhaps they’ll also win a 2013 Domain Dunce award.