ICANN advised to address the issue of name collisions before approving new gTLDs

ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) issued an Advisory on the Stability of the Domain Namespace tackling the issue of ‘name collisions’ – the ambiguity on the use of the domain namespace, in cases when domain names allocated and used within the public Domain Name System (DNS) are also used for other purposes, outside the DNS (for example, home and corp are used as domain names in private networks, but there are also applications for these names to be registered as new generic top level domains – gTLDs). Noting that name collisions threatens the stability of the domain namespace, SSAC recommends that ICANN establishes ‘definitive and unambiguous criteria for determining whether or not a syntactically valid domain name label could be a top-level domain name in the global DNS’, and that it does not make any decision to add new TLDs to the DNS until this matter is addressed.