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
.网站	Global Website TLD Asia Limited	namesphere.asia	View

With close to 500 million users online, China is already the country with the most Internet users. However, with a population of over 1.3 billion people, that represents only a penetration rate of around 36%. Part of the challenge for the hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users who have yet to be connected is the ability to navigate the Internet with domain names in their own language. The ability to have complete domain names in Chinese script is seen as providing significant opportunity to these people, as well as offering tremendous value and benefit to the current online users.

The meaning of the TLD string “网站” roughly translates to ‘website’ in English. The purpose of the TLD is therefore to support the development of Chinese websites around the world. Furthermore, the Registry aspires to become a breeding ground for innovation and development for the global Chinese Internet community as a generic Chinese IDN TLD.

The introduction of a fully generic Chinese IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) TLD also provides an opportunity for global businesses to open a window into the rapidly growing Chinese Internet marketplace. Businesses and initiatives around the world can better communicate and express themselves with a more friendly and memorable online identity to the audience in China.

The vision of the .网站 TLD is that through the development of an open generic namespace supporting full Chinese IDNs, it could become a nucleus for Internet activities from and for the Chinese community, and become a driver of economic and social value for Chinese users around the world.

The mission and purposes of the .网站 TLD are:

1. To develop a namespace that is meaningful to the Chinese language community and is globally recognized as a prime Chinese IDN gTLD;

2. To operate a secure, stable and trusted Chinese IDN gTLD with a reputation as a reliable online destination on the Internet;

3. To foster the sense of connection and ownership from the Chinese language community to the Internet, especially to engage participation in global Internet governance;

4. To promote the accessibility of the Internet to the majority of Chinese users whose primary spoken and written language is Chinese; and,

5. To serve the global Chinese language community with an open generic namespace supporting a full Chinese IDN experience.

Based on the broad generic nature of the .网站 TLD, Global Website TLD Asia Limited (the ‘Registry’) aspires to become the domain of choice for individuals and companies developing websites serving the Chinese language community.

In addition to its mission and vision as a new gTLD, the Registry believes in its responsibility as a responsible industry participant to advance competition, enhance consumer trust and promote consumer choice with the development of the TLD:

A. Advance Constructive Competition

The release of IDN TLDs in this new gTLD round is expected to add a significant level of overall competition to the market for domain registrations by introducing an option to register full Chinese domain names based on a Chinese IDN gTLD. The .网站 TLD seeks to especially target to capture the segment of the market that is not yet online, especially those that could find English alphanumeric TLDs to be difficult to manage.

This is important, as it is expected that a number of proposed new TLDs will enhance competition by targeting existing domain registrations and penetrating into the existing marketplace with aims to switch away from or add to their existing domains. As a broad generic IDN gTLD, .网站 aspires to attract a good portion of registrations from amongst new Internet users such as Chinese SMEs that are just about to get online, and be unique to the TLD, rather than primarily being alternative registrations across multiple TLDs.

B. Enhance Consumer Trust

Based on expert studies, Internet users have more trust for domain names that exactly match what they are looking for. Today, Chinese Internet users may still be using English alphanumeric domains because those already online may be more familiar with English. Even so, an absolute majority searches online in their native language: Chinese. A full Chinese IDN is therefore one of the best ways for companies from China or looking to enter the China market, to speak to and be found by the target audience.

The value of the TLD name in itself is therefore a core part of the value and of building consumer trust. Companies can establish their own dedicated domain for videos introducing their company or for online customer support via video instead of using other platforms.

Furthermore, appropriate Abuse Prevention & Mitigation (APM) as well as Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPM) are also important to ensuring a trusted domain space. Further details of APM and RPM beyond the basic ICANN requirements are discussed in response to Question 28 and Question 29.

C. Promote Consumer Choice

The Registry believes that a broadly generic full Chinese IDN TLD promotes choice for registrants to better express their offline identity online without being diluted by the “.ascii” restriction (or be boxed-in to a country code).

Based on recent studies, the majority of the Asian online population is under the age of 30. This young crowd is energetically engaged in social media, with a growing social networking population which surpassed 250 million (the entire Internet population in the US is estimated at 245M) in 2011. Already half of China’s online population is microblogging on Twitter-like services, and that percentage is expected to rise to two-thirds by 2014. The significance of this is that the user generated content is almost exclusively in Chinese language, and therefore it is only natural that the choice of web addresses used should be Chinese. Furthermore, the microblogging scene is not just about teenagers. Companies are scrambling to join this Chinese conversation to promote their brands on the major microblogging platforms as consumers continue flocking to them.

Riding the creative explosion of the Chinese Internet users, the .网站 TLD promotes consumer choice by providing an option for users, including individuals and companies, to utilize different microblogging platforms and integrate them onto their own website under their own domain, rather than to rely and depend on the platform. That also promotes user choice in helping users to regain control of their traffic and reduce the barrier for switching between providers.