.Shop applicant has really lost it this time — Oh brother

Commercial Connect thinks applicant guidebook states only one TLD ought to be allocated for the entire “ecommerce namespace”.

Commercial Connect LLC wants the .shop top level domain…badly.

It also doesn’t want anyone else to be able to offer a top level domain that could in any way take away .shop’s marketshare.

That’s why it filed string confusion objections against applications like .buy, .ecom, .services, and .sale. It is (rightfully) losing most of those objections. So today it put out a press release claiming that ICANN isn’t following its fresh TLD guidebook by allowing more than one TLD “for the eCommerce Name Space”.

$100 goes to the first person who can show me where in the applicant guidebook it states this:

ICANN’s 2012 Applicant Handbook states that in the review process, all proposed TLDs would be categorized by Name Space. This means that in the eCommerce arena, TLDs applicants such as .shop, .store, .buy, .supplies and .services would all be grouped together and following a thorough review, only one TLD for the eCommerce Name Space would be awarded.

This is almost as silly as when a group backing .sport argued that no specific sports, like .basketball, ought to be allocated.

Commercial Connect also states that ICANN may be “…abandoning its long held belief that Internet names ought to be sacred and sparse.”

I have news for Commercial Connect: If it argues that .buy and .shop can’t coexist in a sparse namespace, then perhaps .shop and .com shouldn’t, either.

The press release is regarding Top Line (sic) Domains, not Top Level Domains. So perhaps this is something from a completely alternate universe…