Donuts, Inc., Applicant for the New gTLD .City Says Its Not Confusing Similar To .Citi

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In a comment posted on ICANN site today Donuts, Inc. which has applied for the new gTLD .City, weighted in on whether the new gTLD’s of .Citi and .City are similarly confusing

In  Donuts opinion that they are not.

Writing for Donuts, Inc. was Richard Tindal said:

“Donuts agrees with Citigroup’s comment that .CITY and .CITI are visually dissimilar. The Citigroup comment correctly states that ICANN has delegated numerous TLDs with common characters and endings in “I” and “Y,” such as .BI and .BY, .CI and .CY, and .SI and .SY without resulting user confusion. Additional examples of non-identical strings include generic and country code TLDs, such as .BZ and .BIZ or .CO and .COM. At the second level, it can be noted that city.com and citi.com have existed side-by-side for many years without noticeable consumer confusion.

The standard applied by the Similarity Panel holds that the average Internet user is likely to be visually confused. With the above examples peacefully coexisting in the DNS, it’s difficult to understand how .CITY and .CITI might be interpreted as meeting that standard. Citigroup argues persuasively that similarity can (and often does) depend on the number of characters in strings (the shorter the strings, the less likely to create confusion). Donuts does not seek or expect contention between its own application for .CITY and Citigroup’s application for .CITI and, accordingly, affirms Citigroup’s comment.”

There have been other applicants that have filed comments on whether the two strings are confusing similar including Citibank itself which came to the same conclusion.
Donuts, Inc. applied for the most number of new gTLD’s and is one of them is for the new gTLD  .City.
So we have one applicant for .City agreeing with Citibank which applied for .Citi that they are not confusing similar.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. BrianWick says

    At best Citi is a play (or exploitation) on City – not the other way around.

    Will Citi be making a claim for Dodge City or Central City, for example ?

    I guess what I am saying is CITI got themselves into this mess

  3. LM says

    I wonder if their insistence will be as enthusiastic that i and y are so different and are in no way confusingly similar when they come to UDRP other potential typo domains.

  5. Grim says

    Most people will likely type in CITY if they hear either one. So it appears that CITI will be at a disadvantage, and will really have to market the extension if they want people to understand the difference.

    In the end, one has to question if it will be worth it, or if they should have just been satisfied with their .COM presence, avoiding the marketing issues that are sure to come with CITI.

  7. Cmm Movie says

    There is a court decision that citybank.org is confusingly similar to the bran “Citibank”. So basically the correct spelling was considered a typo of incorrect spelling.

  8. Volker Greimann says

    From the 2009 UDRP decision Citigroup Inc. v. Domain Deluxe c/o Domain Administrator, where CitiGroup claims:

    “Respondent’s citywarrants.com domain name is confusingly similar to Complainant’s CITIWARRANTS mark.”

    Conclusion of the panelist: The variant of the name was a “mistyped variation” of and “substantively identical” to the Citigroup trademark.

    So .citi and .city are not confusingly similar, or only when it suits Citigroup.

    So have fun registering warrants.city, checking.city or even (gasp) bank.city…