gTLD	Full Legal Name	E-mail suffix	Detail
.buy	dot Buy Limited	famousfourmedia.com	View

Q18A
Mission and Purpose of .buy?
The Applicant’s mission and purpose is to create an environment where individuals and companies can interact and express themselves in ways never before seen on the Internet, in a more targeted, secure and stable environment. Its aim is to become the premier online destination for such creators and their wide range of users. The Applicant will create an Internet space whose central function is to provide a platform for creating, producing and disseminating informative, creative and innovative content that is easily recognizable as pertaining to its stakeholder group. The Applicant is acutely aware of the importance of ICANN’s mission in coordinating the global Internetʹs systems of unique identifiers and ensuring their secure and stable operation. The Applicant’s core focus is to create a secure, sustainable, and specialized gTLD, thus supporting ICANN’s primary goals for this program in promoting consumer trust, consumer choice, competition and innovation.

Why .buy?
Buying products or services online is very popular with internet users. There is a sense that shopping is something to look forward to, a treat or reward. Not only is this sense achieved through the goods themselves, but also the act of exploring and purchasing them. Therefore, the aim of .buy is to enhance and develop the consumer experiences of online shopping.

Since its inception the internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, empowered hundreds of millions with knowledge and created a platform where global commerce can thrive. However, access to the countless benefits and opportunities which the internet offers can often be hindered when navigating the ever-expanding sea of irrelevant and sometimes malicious content which also exists.

Thus, the aim of .buy is to create a blank canvas for the online shopping sector set within a secure environment. The Applicant will achieve this by creating a consolidated, versatile and dedicated space for the shopping sector. As the new space is dedicated to those within this affinity group the Applicant will ensure that consumer trust is promoted. Consequently consumer choice will be augmented as there will be a ready marketplace specifically for enterprises to provide their goods and services. All stakeholders within the sector will be able to sample reactions to new ideas, or gather thoughts on the improvements of established ones. This will drive innovation and competition within the shopping sector as there will be new channels available not yet fulfilled by current market offerings. This new environment will cause registrants to seek new ways to separate themselves from the competition.

How will .buy take shape?
The Applicant believes that the success of the gTLD will be determined largely by the sector’s key global stakeholders. These stakeholders will be interested in registering a domain and additionally be motivated to protect their sector from detrimental practices. The Applicant believes that stakeholders should have the opportunity to influence the gTLD and the way it is governed. Accordingly, the Applicant is establishing a Governance Council (“GC”), consisting of key stakeholders that will serve as an advisory body.

Why Applicant?
The Applicant has substantial combined experience amongst its team in managing global businesses from a financial, legal and operational perspective and an exceptionally strong financial position. The Applicant’s Team has previous experience with the entire gTLD life-cycle significantly lowering any launch and ongoing operational risks associated with this application. The Applicant has engaged a world-class Registry services provider to manage the technical infrastructure of the .buy gTLD. The Applicant is further advised by the leading sector experts in all other areas required to ensure a responsible and successful launch and ongoing management of the gTLD to the benefit of all stakeholders in the ICANN community.

Information for future studies and reviews
The Applicant recognizes the connection of the new gTLD application to the Affirmation of Commitments (“AoC”). To gauge the success of the new gTLD program, the Applicant recognizes that an AoC Review Team will be formed one year after the first delegation. To prepare for this, the ICANN Board resolved the creation of a Working Group to formulate definitions of competition, consumer trust and consumer choice and possible metrics for the future AoC team to consider in its gTLD review. The Applicant understands this effort has not been adopted by the ICANN Board, but many of the proposed metrics may be used to gauge the Applicant’s gTLD effectiveness and the gTLD program. The Applicant intends to track costs and benefit metrics to inform future studies and reviews. Proposed definitions are:
- Consumer Trust is defined as the confidence registrants and users have in the consistency of name resolution and the degree of confidence among registrants and users that a TLD Registry operator is fulfilling its proposed purpose and is complying with ICANN policies and applicable national laws.
- Consumer Choice is defined as the range of options available to registrants and users for domain scripts and languages, and for TLDs that offer choices as to the proposed purpose and integrity of their domain name registrants.
- Competition is defined as the quantity, diversity, and the potential for market rivalry of TLDs, TLD Registry operators, and Registrars.

Promoting Competition
Given the proposed definition for competition, the Applicant will attain this by contributing to the quantity and diversity within the Registry Operator space. The Applicant is a new entrant enhancing competition among the providers. The Applicant will promote competition for Registrants by amongst other things:
- Building a healthy growth trend of domain registrations
- Measure migration of content from other TLDs
- Maintain competitive pricing of domains

Promoting consumer trust
.buy will be developed with consumer trust and satisfaction in mind. After 2 years of operations, the Applicant will conduct a survey to measure consumer trust and consumer satisfaction. This will be used to improve the service. The Applicant will among other things measure the following:
- Service Availability of Critical Registry Systems
- Abuse and Takedown incidents
- Rights protection incidents
- WHOIS data accuracy

Promoting consumer choice
The Applicant intends to promote consumer choice by achieving the following:
- Display of registration requirements and restrictions in the gTLD
- Highly available and geographically diverse Registrar channel
- Effective sunrise and trademark services

Domain names will be available globally, although the Applicant’s initial marketing efforts will be predominately directed to potential Registrants represented by the six (6) official languages of the United Nations (“UN Languages”), Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian and Spanish.
After the initial 2 years it is the Applicant’s aim that:
- Registrants globally should have access to Registrar services for the gTLD in at least the six UN Languages
- The gTLD is offered by Registrars covering at least 40 Countries and territories globally

Information on the effectiveness of safeguards
The Applicant takes rights protection and abuse prevention and mitigation very seriously and has developed policies accordingly. Amongst others, the Applicant will collect and evaluate data regarding:
- Effectiveness of the Sunrise process in limiting abusive registration practices
- Effectiveness of the additional Abuse Prevention and Mitigation (ʺAPMʺ)and Rights Protection Mechanisms (ʺRPMʺ)in limiting abusive registration practices
- Effectiveness of the mandatory APMs and RPMs
-end-

gTLD	Full Legal Name	E-mail suffix	Detail
.weather	The Weather Channel LLC	weather.com	View

The mission and purpose of a new restricted .weather gTLD is to benefit internet users by ensuring increased trust, convenience and utility.

The .weather gTLD will create a next generation gTLD serving the interests of end users. The .weather gTLD will provide an authoritative Internet space for weather content, where the trusted services and resources of The Weather Channel, LLC (TWC), its affiliates, and partners will be closely controlled and made available to consumers around the world. The majority of the anticipated domain name registrations in .weather will be used in the communication of TWC’s content and services, including accurate, easily accessible, and potentially lifesaving weather-related information. A subset of domain names has the potential to be created and used for personalized and hyper-local information purposes.

TWC is a wholly owned subsidiary of TWCC Holding Corporation (TWCCHC). Together with other subsidiaries of TWCCHC, TWC is a part of The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC). TWCC, through its subsidiaries including TWC, owns The Weather Channel television network, The Weather Channel digital properties and other weather-related businesses including WSI Corporation (WSI). The Weather Channel television network reaches over 100 million US households, and TWCC’s web properties (including weather.com) receive 60 million unique users each month. TWC reaches 40 million mobile consumers monthly through its tablet and mobile telephone applications and mobile websites, with TWCC mobile applications being one of the most used on smart phones and tablets. WSI provides weather data and services to top companies in the local television⁄media, energy, and aviation industries. TWC was initially launched in 1982 to program and deliver a cable television network and today, TWCC is a leading global brand and a recognized world leader in weather forecasting capabilities with global coverage including UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, India, Brazil and other Latin American countries. In this regard, continuous innovations and improvements in weather forecasting technologies and reliable online presence are the main consideration in TWC’s activities. TWCC has approximately 1,100 employees and is headquartered in Atlanta, US with offices in global locations including New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, Dallas and London.

Since the inception of the current domain name system, business activities conducted on the internet have been constantly changing and evolving with increased complexity. Internet innovation has brought benefits of simplicity and lowered transaction costs. However, criminal activities over the internet including data breach, hacking and phishing activities have also become more sophisticated, resulting in loss of consumer confidence. In addition, consumer trust has been eroded by unauthorized and inaccurate sources of information. The .weather gTLD will facilitate greater trust and assurance from internet users connecting with weather-related content online, while increasing the convenience and efficiency of their interactions.

TWC’s mission and purpose of the proposed new gTLD share ICANN’s initiatives to promote public interest. TWC is committed to contributing toward achieving such initiatives in line with ICANN’s Affirmation of Commitments, which includes:
- consumer trust: the .weather registry will be operated in a centralized manner with a restrictive registration policy. Registration of domain names will be available only to TWC and its affiliates⁄partners, which will provide added consumer trust that .weather domain names are trustworthy. As .weather domain names are subject to registration standards, policies and procedures under TWC’s control, this eliminates the possibility of malicious conduct within the .weather domain space;
- competition: .weather will spur innovation and competition in the weather media space by increasing the personalization and customization for consumers and providing weather-related information in a new and differentiated way. It will also spur innovation and competition among top level domain (TLD) operators by showcasing innovative, trustworthy, and compelling ways in which TLDs can be used to benefit consumers; and
- consumer choice: .weather will provide consumers with new, more personalized and intuitive options to navigate the internet to find weather related information. The .weather gTLD will provide consumers with more choices for interacting with TWC and weather-related content overall.

Given the restricted nature of the .weather gTLD, the projected number of registrations is likely to be limited. It is anticipated that a rather limited number of around 210 domain names will be registered in the first year to cover the US, the world’s largest weather market. However, over the next few years, the number of registrations is likely to increase to about 100,000 domain names as TWC develops and implements new services to cover weather markets worldwide.

As the .weather gTLD expands and evolves, TWC may consider offering the use of second level domain names to its global partners including distribution partners (web portals, mobile OEMs), B2B customers, advertisers, and other digital content publishers at a later date. In this endeavor, TWC will continue to comply with all operational, technical and policy requirements to maintain consumer trust and the stability of the internet. TWC will keep ICANN reasonably informed of any material developments relating to .weather including compliance with the continued operations instrument obligations as set out in Specification 8 of the Registry Agreement.

TWC intends to create relevant domain names for use including services, geographic and other place names within .weather to provide accurate and relevant weather-related information to its customers. In accordance with registration policy and the proposed measures for protection of geographic names as outlined in response to Question 22, TWC will use geographic names to localize its websites in the countries and regions relevant to its operation. The use of geographic names is intended to:
- connect internet users with relevant information as applicable to the territory; and
- comply with required rules and regulations in the national territory.

TWC does not intend to utilize Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) at the second level at the time of launch. However, as the use of .weather evolves, TWC may utilize IDNs within .weather to allow internet users to engage in their native language, creating a more positive user experience and encouraging diversity.

TWCC is a well-recognized global brand with registered and pending trademarks (through TWC) consisting solely of “weather” or “weather.com” in 36 countries and territories for (but not limited to) the following classes: 9 (instruments, pre-recorded audio and video recording), 16 (print), 35 (advertising), 38 (telecommunications), 41 (education), 42 (online publications; meteorological services), 45 (personal and social services).

TWC has an extensive domain name portfolio including existing domain names with an exact match to the “weather” trademark and the applied-for string in various domain spaces including, com, mobi, travel, co.at, co.gg, co.uk, co.uz, com.ag, com, dm, com.ec, com.gy, com.kn, com.pr, com.vc, dm, gl, gy, kn, tv, uz

TWC believes that the .weather gTLD is unlikely to cause confusion with either a generic term or any existing TLDs. TWCC is a leading global brand and a recognized leader in weather forecasting capabilities. TWC is the owner of several trademarks worldwide containing or consisting solely of the term “weather” and has a strong worldwide reputation. TWC has used the term “weather” in conjunction with its core business since its establishment and reaches close to 100 million TV viewers, 60 million web users and 40 million mobile users monthly.