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

Prototypical answer:

The .BCN TLD is requested by the Ajuntament de Barcelona (Barcelona City Council) as a TLD for the institutional purposes of the departments and online services of the City Council. BCN is the acronym of the city of Barcelona, used by Barcelona City Council online and offline communications, as well as by printed media (newspapers, magazines, etc) when they refer to the City.

The institutional purpose of the Barcelona City Council is to promote the welfare of the city of Barcelona, its citizens, visitors, and any lawful interest related to the city and its area of influence, as both the capital of Catalonia and an open city to the world.

The Barcelona City Council has also applied for the .BARCELONA TLD as a community TLD for the benefit of the .BARCELONA community, that is, its citizens and anyone having bona fide relations with Barcelona and its area of influence. However, the .BCN TLD will be used exclusively by the Barcelona City Council, and will not be available for registrations from third parties.

BCN is the IATA code for Barcelonaʹs international airport, and the use of this acronym has become popular, being widely used in newspapers and as an abbreviation of the name of the city. So much so that the City Council is already using “bcn.cat” (and bcn.es and bcn.net in the past) to name its main website; as such, it appears in many different publications of the Barcelona City Council.

Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of 101.4 square kilometers (39 square miles). The urban area of Barcelona extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of between 4,200,00 and 4,500,000 within an area of 803 square kilometers (310 square miles), making it the sixth most populous such area in the European Union after Paris, London, the Ruhr, Madrid and Milan. It is also Europeʹs largest metropolis on the Mediterranean Sea and hosts Europeʹs ninth largest container port, with a trade volume of 2.57 million TEU in 2008.
Barcelona is today one of the worldʹs leading tourist, economic, trade-exhibition and cultural-sport centers, and its influence in commerce, education, entertainment, media, fashion, science, and the arts contributes to its status as one of the worlds major global cities.
Barcelona is the 16th most visited city in the world and the fourth most visited in Europe after Paris, London, and Rome, with several million tourists every year. Barcelonaʹs international airport handles over 34 million passengers per year.

The goals of a .BCN TLD are:

a. To strengthen the institutional image of Barcelona City Council services in the on-line world
b. To facilitate digital communications between the Barcelona City Council, its providers and citizens
c. To promote the City in the digital world
d. To facilitate access to City services and information
e. To improve security and trust in any interaction with Barcelona City Council online services
f. To present our Internet services under a different, unique, and trusted name that no other entity can use
g. To enhance brand recognition
h. To defend the BCN name, brand, and trademark in the new scenario created by ICANN


This is to be achieved by:

i. Creating an interface between citizens and our services
ii. Creating an integrated virtual and physical service channel
iii. Providing a coherent look and feel for our websites and for online communications with all our services and social activities

The Barcelona City Council has decided to apply for the .BCN TLD as an strategical long-term opportunity. We believe that the gTLD program will represent a tremendous opportunity for our City to reinforce the branding of our organization, departments, and online services under a distinctive name. We have been following with interest the new ICANN gTLD program since its inception and we have gathered enough intelligence to make an educated decision. We understand the opportunities and the responsibility that this opening implies, and we are fully committed to run a piece of Internet infrastructure by owing our own Institutional Top Level Domain: .BCN.
The mission of the Barcelona City Council is to serve the needs of the citizens of Barcelona. We understand that this can be better achieved using a trusted and distinctive TLD that will univocally identify municipal behavior online. The Barcelona City Council aims to offer and project this comprehensive range of services online under the .BCN TLD, to give excellent service to its growing online community of users.

The Barcelona City Council aims to continuously strengthen our brand reputation and to search for new formulas to create competitive advantages for our citizens; .BCN TLD will place us as leaders of innovation within the technological cities of the world under a unique, secure, and trusted Internet identifier: .BCN.

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