Donuts challenges ICANN’s .Doctor decision

Stethoscope may be required to register a .Doctor domain name.

Donuts has filed a reconsideration request following ICANN decided to slam the door on who can register a domain name under the .doctor top level domain name.

Last month, ICANN’s Fresh gTLD Program Committee determined that .Doctor ought to be a namespace restricted only to “legitimate medical practitioners”.

This eliminates a number of possible uses of the .doctor domain name. For example, brands like Rug Doctor and Lawn Doctor wouldn’t be able to register the domains. Neither would any of the millions of people who have doctorate degrees not in medicine. And I couldn’t register a clever domain like stolendomain.doctor.

In a post on CircleID, Donuts co-founder Jon Nevett states that ICANN has “quarantined” .doctor with an arbitrary restriction not applied to other top level domains that have GAC advice.

The reconsideration request is published online here.

Donuts is one of three applicants for .doctor. The others are Radix and The Medical Registry Limited.