Uh-oh: ICANN will be forced to act following conflicting .cars decisions

A conflicting opinion over .cars leads to an interesting contention set problem.

A panelist for a string confusion objection brought by Google against DERcars, LLC over the top level domain name .cars has ruled in favor (link removed since no longer active) of Google.

By ruling in favor of Google, that means DERcars’ application for .cars will be put into a contention set with Google’s application for .car.

This creates a big problem.

You see, DERcars’ application isn’t the only one for .cars. Donuts applied for it, too. Google also objected to Donuts’ application but a different panelist ruled against Google in that case. Uniregistry also applied and Google’s objection in that case is still outstanding. [Update: Uniregistry won its case.]

How will this work? One application for .cars will be in a contention set with .car, but at least one won’t.

If DERcars wins an auction against Google, would it then also have to go to auction against Donuts (and possibly Uniregistry?)

ICANN is going to be forced to show its hand following this decision. The issue of conflicting string confusion objections will have to be addressed.

[See the comments for discussion on how this will likely be handled.]