In March 2013, the SSAC issued SAC057: SSAC Advisory on Internal Name Certificates, wherein the SSAC referred to the issue of "name collision" and provided the ICANN Board with steps for mitigating the issue. On 18 May 2013, the ICANN Board adopted resolution 2013.05.18.09 – 2013.05.18.11, regarding SAC057, commissioning a study on the use of TLDs that are not currently delegated at the root level of the public DNS in enterprises.
In August 2013, Interisle Consulting Group published “Name Collision in the DNS”, which looked at historical query traffic and found that .HOME and .CORP were the top two most frequently appearing TLDs in queries. A Public Comment, opened 5 August and ending 27 August 2013, sought community participation regarding ICANN’s draft mitigation plan, “New gTLD Collision Risk Mitigation”. This plan cited .HOME and .CORP as high-risk strings, proposing not to delegate these two strings.
On 7 October 2013, the ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) passed resolutions 2013.10.07.NG01 – 2013.10.07.NG02 to implement the mitigation plan for managing name collision occurrences as proposed in the "New gTLD Name Collision Occurrence Management Plan." On 30 July 2014, the ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee adopted the Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework. In the Framework, .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL were noted as high-risk strings whose delegation should be deferred indefinitely.
On 28 October 2015, ICANN org announced the publication of JAS Global Advisors’ "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions (Final Report)." The recommendations in the Final Report were consistent with the recommendations made in the Phase One report.
In 2015, individuals in the IETF DNS Operations (DNSOP) working group wrote an Internet Draft, the first step in developing an RFC, that reserved the CORP, HOME, and MAIL labels from delegation into the top level of the DNS, but the working group and the authors of that draft were unable to reach consensus on the criteria by which labels would be reserved and the effort to create an RFC on the topic was abandoned.
On 24 August 2016, applicants for .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL sent correspondence to the ICANN Board requesting that "the Board commission a timely examination of mitigation measures that will enable the release of .HOME, .CORP, and .MAIL." On 6 March 2017 [PDF, 239 KB], Akram Atallah, President of the Global Domains Division, provided a response to the 24 August 2016 letter, acknowledging the request and noting that "the topic of name collision continues to be considered by the ICANN Board."
On 2 November 2017, the ICANN Board passed resolutions 2017.11.02.29 – 2017.11.02.31 which requested that the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) conduct a study to present data, analysis and points of view and provide advice to the Board on a range of questions. The Board charged the Board Technical Committee to act as the Board's liaison to this study.
In January 2018, the SSAC Name Collision Analysis Project (NCAP) Work Party ("NCAP WP") was formed and prepared a plan calling for three studies. The NCAP Administration ("NCAP Admin"), a smaller group comprising the NCAP WP leadership and SSAC leadership, was also created to guide the NCAP effort both within SSAC and in the larger ICANN community.
In September 2018, SSAC published "SSAC Proposal for the Name Collision Analysis Project", which proposed three consecutive studies to address the Board's request. OCTO proposed minor changes to the proposal and, after discussion between SSAC and OCTO, an updated version of the proposal was published in February 2019.
In June 2018, after input from the Board, the CEO assigned the Office of the Chief Technical Officer (OCTO) to be responsible for completing the NCAP studies since SSAC does not have the administrative infrastructure to undertake and manage such a large project. An updated version of the proposal was published in February 2019.
On 30 May 2019, the Name Collision Analysis Project Team completed a Statement of Work for Study 1 and a Statement of Interest. On 1 July 2019, a “Proposed Definition of Names Collision and Scope of Inquiry for NCAP”.
In July 2019, ICANN published the RFP: Project Overview for the Name Collision Analysis Project (NCAP) Study 1, and announced the search for a contractor to perform the research, analysis, and writing necessary to produce Study 1 of the Name Collision Analysis Project (NCAP).
On 1 November 2019, the Chair of the ICANN Board addressed concerns from the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), regarding any dependencies between NCAP and the ongoing policy work of the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures policy development process.
On 12 February 2020, ICANN published the draft report for Study 1: Managing the Risks of Top-Level Domain 2 Name Collisions 3 Findings for the Name Collision Analysis Project (NCAP) Study 1. The report went up for Public Comment on 13 February 2020 a Report of Public Comments was published on 17 April 2020.
The Final Report version was published for Public Comment on 8 May 2020, with a Report of Public Comments published on 1 July 2020.
On 5 February 2021, SSAC delivered the NCAP Proposal for Study 2 to the Board Technical Committee.
