As new TLD’s spring up like wildflowers, how does ICANN ensure that it meets the requirement of “Strings must not be confusingly similar to an existing top-level domain …”? 
Well, Paul E. Black at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has come up with an algorithm to assess the degree of visual confusion between proposed or existing TLDs.
Two implementations of the algorithm, have been published on the NIST website, titled “Compute Visual Similarity of Top-Level Domains”. The first implementation can compare a string to proposed TLDs. For example, .pro has a 38% similarity to .prof.
The second implementation can compare two strings to each other. For example, .com and .cm have a 22% similarity to each other.
It will very interesting to see how this evolves over the coming years, especially with the possibility of different languages being introduced.
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Tags: comparison, icann, similarity, TLD
