To rethink .Hospital decision next week — ICANN Board

.Hospital has been on life support since bad objection decision.

ICANN’s Board of Directors will consider the fate of a .Hospital top level domain name when it meets on Sunday. It’s a chance for the board to right a wrong.

.Hospital was killed off following two of three panelists agreed with a Limited Public Interest Objection filed by the Independent Objector.

The panelists disregarded the guidelines and essentially created their own standard for if .hospital ought to be allowed or not, as I explained in December 2013.

For example, the two panelists railed against Donuts for wanting to run the domain name for commercial purposes. The panelists also focused more on possible content that could be hosted on .hospital domain names as opposed to the string itself.

The dissenting panelist in the objection wrote:

It is not the task of an expert panel to rewrite the application standards for gTLD strings and to supplement them with higher standards in the public interest. Rather, its task is limited to determining whether a specific applied-for string, taking into account its intended use as stated in the application is “contrary to generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under principles of international law.

Donuts asked ICANN to review the decision shortly following it was rendered.

There is some precedent for overturning an objection panel’s decision. In October 2014, the board agreed that two string confusion objections ought to get a do-over.

Donuts was the only applicant for .Hospital, so overturning the panel decision would not affect other applicants.