18(a) Describe the mission/purpose of your proposed gTLD

Prototypical answer:

Mumbai Indians (MI) is a popular and prominent cricket franchise representing the city of Mumbai in the Indian Premier League (IPL), now in its 5th season. Mumbai Indians is owned by Reliance Industries Limited and is headed by Smt. Nita Mukesh Ambani, the wife of the Managing Director (MD) of Reliance Industries limited (RIL), Sh. Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani.
The Reliance Group, founded by Sh. Dhirubhai H. Ambani (1932-2002), is Indiaʹs largest private sector enterprise in India. The groupʹs annual revenues are in excess of US$ 58 billion (2010-2011). The flagship company, Reliance Industries Limited, is a Fortune Global 500 company ranked 134, by net revenues, and 119, by net profit, as per Fortune Global 500 list, 2011. The company has interests across multiple sectors including Exploration and Production, Refining and Marketing, Petrochemicals, Organized Retail, Telecom and Financial Services.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) is a professional league for Twenty20 cricket competition in India. It was initiated by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in 2008. As of now, 9 teams participate in the competition, consisting of players from around the world. As of the fourth season IPL’s brand value was estimated to be around $3.67 billion.
MI was started in 2008 and was one of the founding members of IPL. Since its inception it has amassed a huge fan following with about 2.5 million fans and many more who wear the official colour ‘blue’ with pride and swear by the team. All MI cricket matches have been played in a sold out stadium with waves of colour blue, cheering the team. We estimate that Mumbai Indians fans will cross the 3.5 million mark by the end of this IPL season and grow to 4.5 million by the next one.
MI team is the proud owner of some of the most talented and respected cricketers from around the globe, including players from India, Sri Lanka, Australia and South Africa. By the end of the fourth season the brand value for MI was estimated to be around $57.13 million .
MI has been using the power of the Internet to spread its message and bring cricket to the Internet by making significant investments over the course of 4 years. Currently Mumbai Indians owns www.mumbaiindians.com and is very active on all the major social networking platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Mumbai Indians wants to acquire and own the TLD “.Indians” to further its dream and make Internet a part of the lives of its fans and countless other Indians who proudly wear the colour blue.
Today Mumbai Indians’ primary website ‘www.mumbaiindians.com’ enjoys traffic which exceeds 30,000 unique visitors per month. Since IPL is an annual event which mostly runs in the months of April and May, the traffic peaks during these months but the website enjoys a steady stream of about 6000 monthly visitors through the year. The visitors to the website are generally interested in information about players, match schedules, scores of current and previous matches, match day pictures, videos and buying tickets.
By acquiring the domain “.Indians” MI would like to offer its fans and Indians in general an opportunity to associate themselves with the name “Indians” by allowing second level domain names under the TLD “.Indians”. This offer will initially be open to only the fans of Mumbai Indians who become a member of the exclusive Mumbai Indians club and wish to enjoy the club’s privileges along with a unique website address with “.Indians” as a top level domain name.
The program will then be extended to the rest of India so that that every Indian, irrespective of their location, race, caste, creed can proudly declare that they belong to the great nation of India and acquire a “.Indians” web address.
By acquiring “.Indians” we wish to harness its power and provide:
- An easier navigation to the website by providing an easy to remember address
- A higher brand recall and increased traffic to the website
- Control over the second level domains and the ability to offer them to Indians and Mumbai Indians fans
- A chance for Indians to move from passive consumers of Internet to active participants
Every year the MI team promotes the website, the Facebook page and the twitter account through various marketing activities ranging from OOH and TVCs to online banner advertisements and sponsored advertisements on Facebook. This generates traffic to its website both of unique and repeat visitors.
RIL intends to further enhance the MI brand and reward its loyal fan base by offering them the opportunity to get a second level domain with “.Indians” as the TLD. Subsequently RIL will offer to the same to public at large across India and the world.
RIL has also purchased 4G frequency license to provide high quality data services in India by paying a license fee of $ 2.8 billion USD. The company is expected to launch the services on a pan India basis and bring Internet access to millions of Indians and to most of them for the first time. With more than 110 million Internet users, and a projected year-on-year growth of 30%, India is expected supersede USA as the second largest Internet users in the world by 2018. This phenomenal growth is difficult to be achieved by using traditional means of communication such as copper wire⁄fibre because of India’s large geographical topology. Thus wireless technology such as 4G⁄LTE is best solution, hence RIL is best poised to lead India on this journey and emerge as a digital power house.
RIL, with direct access to such a large Internet user base will be able to educate and encourage Internet users about domain names and clearly articulate the advantages of having an online presence. In India, less than 3% percentage of Internet users have domain names as compared to developed markets such as UK and USA, where more than 27% of users have domain presence.
India, which boasts of the second largest mobile user base in the world, will soon have an Internet user base to match. Whilst India and Indians prepare for this growth, it is empirical that there be more TLDs, which resonate with Indians and are lucrative enough to excite them and compel them to join the millions of domain owners. “.INDIANS” will not only bring in relevancy but will also make it contextually correct to have domains with an extension of .INDIANS.
In most cases of the other existing TLDs the second level domain names are not available; even if it is available the extension makes it irrelevant to the regional context. These available domain name TLDs are not recallable or recognisable in this part of the world. This has created an artificial but practical limitation in the second level domain extensions. RIL with its 4G wireless broadband service will garner large demand as more and more people in India go online and act to own a personalised domain on the World Wide Web. While the 4G initiative will fuel the growth of the Internet, the “.Indians” initiative, with the help of great content, targeted marketing, and sales strategy will increase the growth of Internet ecosystem by encouraging more participants to actively participate on the Internet.
With the combination of IPL team ‘Mumbai Indians’ and RIL’s 4G initiative, we see a tremendous opportunity for .INDIANS to be one of the most successful TLDs in India and in other international markets which have a large Indian population.
We will offer all Indians including the fans of Mumbai Indians a chance to acquire a second level domain under “.Indians” TLD. We project that in the first year of operation we will be able to sell about 156,630 second level domains; this number will go up to 375,825 domains in the second year and up to 666,870 in the third year of operations.

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