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

gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixDetail
.galAsociación puntoGALpuntogal.orgView
The .gal TLD application is submitted by Asociación puntoGAL in name and on behalf of the Galician linguistic and cultural community, which originated in Galicia, an area in northwestern Iberian Peninsula.
The goals of the .gal TLD are to:

(a) facilitate digital communications from, to and within the Galician linguistic and cultural community;
(b) provide a platform for the development in the digital space of the Galician linguistic and cultural community.
(c) strengthen the image of the Galician linguistic and cultural community in the on-line world.
(d) promote Galician language and culture and foster the development of the community.

This is to be achieved by:

(i) actively designing and developing the .gal TLD name space with a focus on the needs of the Galician linguistic and cultural community, involving cultural, welfare, business and public stakeholders;
(ii) allowing registrations of second-level domains in the Galician linguistic and cultural TLD by individuals and organizations with a bona fide nexus to the Galician linguistic and cultural community; the basic criterion to elucidate this bona fide nexus will be set by the requirement to use the domain names registered for the purpose of online communications in Galician and⁄or related to the Galician culture
(iii) operating the .gal TLD under the stewardship of the Galician linguistic and cultural community: As will be elaborated and detailed under 20 b), Asociación puntoGAL has the explicit support of the Galician public authorities, its most relevant cultural and professional institutions, private sector stakeholders, as well as the support of more than 12,500 individuals.

The .gal TLD will contribute to increase the linguistic and cultural diversity of the DNS, which is one of the main objectives of the gTLD process.
The above-mentioned general goals of the .gal TLD are further developed as follows:
- Meeting point of a lively cultural community: the .gal TLD will serve approximately four million people all around the globe who constitute a community with a rich cultural, social and economic life with unique characteristics and activity. This community is conformed by a language and a culture of great historical relevance and that is nowadays official in the community of Galicia. The Galician language has a remarkable amount of publications and translations and has a very dynamic Internet presence. As an example, Galician ranks as the 43rd language in entries on the Wikipedia.
- Contributing to the normalization of Galician language and to promote its culture: the .gal TLD will be a powerful tool to make Galician more visible and to improve its normalization. In the future, presence on the Internet will be as critical for small languages as having access to the media, education and publishing have been in the past.
- Improving language transmission between generations: The influence of the Internet is specially important for the youth. The .gal TLD will undoubtably help in the re-enhancement trend of the prestige of the Galician among its own speakers, especially among the younger users of the language. Because prestige is an essential factor for ensuring that older generations transmit their language to new generations, it can be said that the .gal TLD will contribute to improve intergenerational language transmission.
- Increasing benefits for Galician cultural industry and its economic life: the .gal TLD will contribute to highlight the public relevance of Galician creations and products both inwards and outwards, increasing their beneficial effects towards both the community and the cultural industries and economy, and offering a vehicle to foster the evolution of Galician cultural industries and economy. The .gal TLD will also serve as a recognizable item and a tool to smooth the cultural industriesʹ transition to the digital-based era.
- Increasing audience for websites in Galician: Internet search enginesʹ usage of the .gal TLD will serve as a tool to offer more accurate results in regards to content in Galician or related to Galician culture. This will help websites in Galician hits increase, improving their advertising revenues and, therefore, fostering lawful commercial visibility of the contents in Galician. Contents aggregators in Galician suffer from low visualization in search engines, who usually give higher ranking to websites in foreign languages, even for domestic content. Furthermore, there are no news search engines for news in Galician. The .gal TLD could be used both to improve search results in Galician and to develop new specific search engines.
- Improving consumer choice by facilitating online marketing and promoting Galician economy: the .gal TLD will help long tail companiesʹ strategies to focus the marketing of their products to the community in Galician or designed for the Galician cultural community. Logically, the companies’ adoption of the .gal TLD to address the Galician market will be key to measure how the .gal TLD has increased consumers’ choice. In addition, it will be easy to measure whether the .gal TLD has contributed to make available more products in Galician, especially Information Technologies and Internet solutions like, for example, news aggregators, directories, blogging platforms, etc.
- Promoting the relations with and within the diaspora: the .gal TLD will contribute to making the huge Galician diaspora more visible and to improve the relations between its nodes and different generations. Websites of Galician emigrants social centers could adopt the .gal TLD to highlight that they are part of a large community. Furthermore, these groups of emigrants will have an important asset at their availability in order to promote the transmission of the language to the younger generations, most of whom have never been in the original territory of the language and who use the Internet as their main source of entertainment and information. An efficient way to measure the .gal TLD performance will be to determine how many of the hundreds of Galician emigrants centers have adopted the new gTLD. At this moment, twenty of them have already joined Asociación puntoGAL. The .gal TLD will also encourage IT companies to launch products specifically designed for the diaspora community.
- A new type of linguistic gTLD: the Galician linguistic and cultural community has a relevant part of its members beyond Galician’s original and historical area of influence. The .gal TLD will be very useful for academics and ICANN to study whether this kind of linguistic and cultural gTLDs effectively contribute to the preservation of a culture among emigrants.
- The previous experience of a linguistic and cultural TLD, .CAT, offered the possibility to evaluate the beneficiary ripple effects of such a TLD and its significant contribution to the profile of the Catalan speaking community on the Internet. Asociación puntoGAL’s cooperation with Fundació puntCAT throughout ECLID - European Cultural and Linguistic Internet Domains - the working group which both entities are founding members of, will contribute to the benefit of the linguistic and cultural TLDs’ knowledge. More information about ECLID: http:⁄⁄www.eclid.eu⁄
- Reinvest all the benefits in the community: Asociación puntoGAL is a non for profit collective. According to the provisions of Asociación puntoGAL’s bylaws, that state that contributing to normalization of the language on the Information Technologies field is one of the objectives of the association, all the benefits from the registration of domains will feed a program to offer economic support to projects that promote Galician in information industry or on the Internet. Asociación puntoGAL will launch this support program after ensuring the financial stability of the new gTLD. Consequently, part of the benefits that online content and product in Galician already generate will return to the linguistic community
gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixDetail
.clothingSteel Lake, LLCdonuts.coView
Q18A CHAR: 7985

ABOUT DONUTS
Donuts Inc. is the parent applicant for this and multiple other TLDs. The company intends to increase competition and consumer choice at the top level. It will operate these carefully selected TLDs safely and securely in a shared resources business model. To achieve its objectives, Donuts has recruited seasoned executive management with proven track records of excellence in the industry. In addition to this business and operational experience, the Donuts team also has contributed broadly to industry policymaking and regulation, successfully launched TLDs, built industry-leading companies from the ground up, and brought innovation, value and choice to the domain name marketplace.

DONUTS’ PLACE WITHIN ICANN’S MISSION
ICANN and the new TLD program share the following purposes:
1. to make sure that the Internet remains as safe, stable and secure as possible, while
2. helping to ensure there is a vibrant competitive marketplace to efficiently bring the benefits of the namespace to registrants and users alike.

ICANN harnesses the power of private enterprise to bring forth these public benefits. While pursuing its interests, Donuts helps ICANN accomplish its objectives by:

1. Significantly widening competition and choice in Internet identities with hundreds of new top-level domain choices;
2. Providing innovative, robust, and easy-to-use new services, names and tools for users, registrants, registrars, and registries while at the same time safeguarding the rights of others;
3. Designing, launching, and securely operating carefully selected TLDs in multiple languages and character sets; and
4. Providing a financially robust corporate umbrella under which its new TLDs will be protected and can thrive.

ABOUT DONUTS’ RESOURCES
Donuts’ financial resources are extensive. The company has raised more than US$100 million from a number of capital sources including multiple multi-billion dollar venture capital and private equity funds, a top-tier bank, and other well-capitalized investors. Should circumstances warrant, Donuts is prepared to raise additional funding from current or new investors. Donuts also has in place pre-funded, Continued Operations Instruments to protect future registrants. These resource commitments mean Donuts has the capability and intent to launch, expand and operate its TLDs in a secure manner, and to properly protect Internet users and rights-holders from potential abuse.

Donuts firmly believes a capable and skilled organization will operate multiple TLDs and benefit Internet users by:

1. Providing the operational and financial stability necessary for TLDs of all sizes, but particularly for those with smaller volume (which are more likely to succeed within a shared resources and shared services model);
2. Competing more powerfully against incumbent gTLDs; and
3. More thoroughly and uniformly executing consumer and rights holder protections.

THIS TLD
This TLD is attractive and useful to end-users as it better facilitates search, self-expression, information sharing and the provision of legitimate goods and services. Along with the other TLDs in the Donuts family, this TLD will provide Internet users with opportunities for online identities and expression that do not currently exist. In doing so, the TLD will introduce significant consumer choice and competition to the Internet namespace – the very purpose of ICANN’s new TLD program.

This TLD is a generic term and its second level names will be attractive to a variety of Internet users. Making this TLD available to a broad audience of registrants is consistent with the competition goals of the New TLD expansion program, and consistent with ICANN’s objective of maximizing Internet participation. Donuts believes in an open Internet and, accordingly, we will encourage inclusiveness in the registration policies for this TLD. In order to avoid harm to legitimate registrants, Donuts will not artificially deny access, on the basis of identity alone (without legal cause), to a TLD that represents a generic form of activity and expression.

DONUTS’ APPROACH TO PROTECTIONS
No entity, or group of entities, has exclusive rights to own or register second level names in this TLD. There are superior ways to minimize the potential abuse of second level names, and in this application Donuts will describe and commit to an extensive array of protections against abuse, including protections against the abuse of trademark rights.

We recognize some applicants seek to address harms by constraining access to the registration of second level names. However, we believe attempts to limit abuse by limiting registrant eligibility is unnecessarily restrictive and harms users by denying access to many legitimate registrants. Restrictions on second level domain eligibility would prevent law-abiding individuals and organizations from participating in a space to which they are legitimately connected, and would inhibit the sort of positive innovation we intend to see in this TLD. As detailed throughout this application, we have struck the correct balance between consumer and business safety, and open access to second level names.

By applying our array of protection mechanisms, Donuts will make this TLD a place for Internet users that is far safer than existing TLDs. Donuts will strive to operate this TLD with fewer incidences of fraud and abuse than occur in incumbent TLDs. In addition, Donuts commits to work toward a downward trend in such incidents.

OUR PROTECTIONS
Donuts has consulted with and evaluated the ideas of international law enforcement, consumer privacy advocacy organizations, intellectual property interests and other Internet industry groups to create a set of protections that far exceed those in existing TLDs, and bring to the Internet namespace nearly two dozen new rights and protection mechanisms to raise user safety and protection to a new level.

These include eight, innovative and forceful mechanisms and resources that far exceed the already powerful protections in the applicant guidebook. These are:

1. Periodic audit of WhoIs data for accuracy;
2. Remediation of inaccurate Whois data, including takedown, if warranted;
3. A new Domain Protected Marks List (DPML) product for trademark protection;
4. A new Claims Plus product for trademark protection;
5. Terms of use that prohibit illegal or abusive activity;
6. Limitations on domain proxy and privacy service;
7. Published policies and procedures that define abusive activity; and
8. Proper resourcing for all of the functions above.

They also include fourteen new measures that were developed specifically by ICANN for the new TLD process. These are:

1. Controls to ensure proper access to domain management functions;
2. 24⁄7⁄365 abuse point of contact at registry;
3. Procedures for handling complaints of illegal or abusive activity, including remediation and takedown processes;
4. Thick WhoIs;
5. Use of the Trademark Clearinghouse;
6. A Sunrise process;
7. A Trademark Claims process;
8. Adherence to the Uniform Rapid Suspension system;
9. Adherence to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy;
10. Adherence to the Post Delegation Dispute Resolution Policy;
11. Detailed security policies and procedures;
12. Strong security controls for access, threat analysis and audit;
13. Implementation DNSSEC; and
14. Measures for the prevention of orphan glue records.

DONUTS’ INTENTION FOR THIS TLD
As a senior government authority has recently said, “a successful applicant is entrusted with operating a critical piece of global Internet infrastructure.” Donuts’ plan and intent is for this TLD to serve the international community by bringing new users online through opportunities for economic growth, increased productivity, the exchange of ideas and information and greater self-expression.