Public Comment

Public Comment is a vital part of our multistakeholder model. It provides a mechanism for stakeholders to have their opinions and recommendations formally and publicly documented. It is an opportunity for the ICANN community to effect change and improve policies and operations.

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Submissions for this Proceeding

String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLD Program: 2026 Round

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String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLD Program: 2026 Round Submission - ICANN Business Constituency (BC)
22 January 2026

Submission Summary:

The BC supports the SSE Guidelines as a critical safeguard against user confusion, fraud, and erosion of confidence in the DNS for the 2026 New gTLD Round. While welcoming the use of expert data and tools to manage scale and complexity, the BC stresses the need for greater transparency, consistency, and explainability in SSE decisions to protect business investment, predictability, and trust in program outcomes.


String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLD Program: 2026 Round Submission - Yin, Oo
22 January 2026

Submission Summary:

Great effort on considering the visual similarity between different scripts and languages.

The guideline will be a great help to prevent the confusion between the cross-script labels.

This is a good start as there need to be a way to have a security mechanism.

Requiring the review from a person with native language fluency is very reasonable.

We have come a long way to make sure the internet is a safe space, and thi...


String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLD Program: 2026 Round Submission - Staub, Werner
21 January 2026

Submission Summary:

The proposed String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines fail to take into account that the objective is to deal with the similarity of entire strings as perceived by a large numbers of users inasmuch as is relevant for the use of the string as a TLD.

In this respect, the proposed Guidelines have a mistaken focus on a narrow interpretation of "visual" similarity like the similarity of "com" (as in COM) and "corn" (as in CORN).

String s...


String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLD Program: 2026 Round Submission - Gevorgyan, Katarine
21 January 2026

Submission Summary:

The comment supports the ICANN String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines while cautioning against adding the Armenian letters ց (U+0581) and զ (U+0566) as a confusingly similar pair in the similarity data. Although these characters may appear similar in certain contexts, such as when underlined, directly including them could create unintended transitivity effects across scripts. Instead, the submission highlight...


String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLD Program: 2026 Round Submission - Jobbins, Amanda
14 January 2026

Submission Summary:

Thank you for you work.


I understand “.ai” is a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) delegated to Anguilla. In practice, it has been widely repurposed as a thematic identifier for "artificial intelligence."


I would like to propose a new thematic generic top-level domain (gTLD) string:


".hi"


intended to signify "human intelligence" as a distinction from artificial intelligence...


String Similarity Evaluation Guidelines for New gTLD Program: 2026 Round Submission - Bauland, Michael
13 January 2026

Submission Summary:

There was a public comment for the data to be used for the automatic pre-processing asking that 'q' and 'g' might be confusingly similar when used with underlining. Putting this ASCII pair into a Category 1-3 in the source data is not a good option, as it would cause too many false positives.

Nevertheless, the panel should take special care when 'q' and 'g' are involved that labels are not confusingly similar due to potential underlining...