Summary

  • On 18 October, ICANN’s board denied Nameshop’s Request 26-4, leaving the July termination of its 2012 .IDN application in place.
  • The board directed its accountability committee to summarily dismiss future reconsideration requests concerning that application ID as frivolous.

Fourteen years is plenty of time to wear a groove in a filing cabinet. ICANN’s board has now put a hard administrative edge on the Nameshop file: it rejected Reconsideration Request 26-4 on 18 October and said further requests about application 1-1873-71868 will be deemed frivolous and summarily dismissed by the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee. The second sentence is the new gate. It is specific to that application and ICANN’s reconsideration channel.

The application’s identity matters more than its aspirational paperwork. Nameshop applied for .IDN in June 2012. Under the rules for that round, the string could not proceed because IDN is Indonesia’s three-letter country code. Nameshop later asked to change the string to .INTERNET; ICANN refused in February 2013. The committee’s September recommendation traces both steps. Posting a change request never changed the underlying application into an application for .INTERNET.

ICANN’s board adopted a closure procedure in September 2025 for unsuccessful 2012 applications that had stayed open. It included notice, time to withdraw and claim a refund, then termination if the applicant declined. Nameshop declined that route in May 2026. Staff marked .IDN terminated on 14 July. Nameshop challenged the staff action, sought an active status and asked ICANN to recognise .INTERNET instead. BAMC recommended denial; the board accepted it, finding that staff had followed the board-approved procedure and that the string-change request had already been refused.

The decision contains a second act, sharper than an ordinary rejection. The board invoked Article 4, Section 4.2(k) of ICANN’s bylaws to pre-label future reconsideration requests relating to the named application as frivolous. That instruction puts the gatekeeper on notice before the next envelope arrives. It does not describe an unseen future filing; it establishes how the institution says it will receive one. A genuinely new event would have to be identified on its own record, not smuggled in as the fourteenth retelling of the 2012 application.

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