esmt.berlin blocklist explanation

[Andy Gardner <ceo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Claudia,

I am sorry to hear that ESMT has been prevented from registering their domain 
in .berlin due to the ICANN blocklist system.

This has not been caused by a conflict with your current esmt.org domain.

The ICANN blocklist deployment was a panic solution to a little understood 
"name collision" risk, by utilising query frequency data from a DNS logging 
system (OARC DITL), without taking query context into account.

Many web browsers (for instance Opera on Blackberry telephones), when presented 
with a search query typed into the URL field instead of the search field, will 
replace any spaces with periods, and go to the DNS and try for a website.

So, in your case, enough people (an arbitrarily chosen number, by the way) 
typed "esmt berlin" into the URL field of an opera browser, leading to those 
phones attempting to reach the website "esmt.berlin", leading to NXDOMAIN 
errors being logged in the 48 hours per year OARC DITL that were then presumed 
by engineers to be a "name collision" worthy of being blocked when the .berlin 
gTLD launched.

But do not feel lonely. There are well over 100,000 natural domain names across 
the newGTLD's that have been falsely tagged as "name collisions" by this 
process.

I wish you luck in your endeavours to have esmt.berlin removed from the ICANN 
blocklist. I have been highlighting this error for many months, without any 
success.

Andrew Gardner
Christchurch, New Zealand.

>We found out that the domain esmt.berlin is on the ICANN Collisions List and 
>we 
>don't understand why. Our institution is called ESMT European School of 
>Management and Technology (located in Berlin) and our current domain is 
>esmt.org.
>The ombudsman believes the source of the conflict may be our ownership of the 
>esmt.org domain name.
>
>i.A. Claudia Höhne
>Web Content & Social Media Manager
>ESMT European School of Management and Technology
>Schlossplatz 1
>10178 Berlin
>Germany