NIST tool helps Internet master top-level domains

At the request of a worldwide Internet organization, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed an algorithm that may guide applicants in proposing new top-level domains the last part of an Internet address, such as.com, that people type in navigating the Web. As new top-level domains are added to the familiar.com,.info and.net, the algorithm* checks whether the newly proposed name is confusingly similar to existing ones by looking for visual likenesses in its appearance. Having visually distinct top-level domain names may help avoid confusion in navigating the ever-expanding Internet and combat fraud, by reducing the potential to create malicious look-alikes:.C0M with a zero instead of.COM, for instance.

Later this year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plans to launch the process for proposing a new round of generic top-level domains (gTLDs), strings such as.net,.gov and.org meant to indicate organizations or interests. In preparing for newly proposed gTLDs, ICANN reached out to various algorithm developers, including NISTs Paul E. Black, as among those engaged to provide an open, objective, and predictable mechanism for assessing the degree of visual confusion in gTLDs.

Blacks algorithm compares a proposed gTLD with other TLDs and generates a score based on their visual similarities. For example, the domain.C0M scores an 88 percent visual similarity with the familiar.COM. The resulting scores may help indicate whether the newly proposed domain name looks too much like existing ones.........