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

gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixDetail
.agencySteel Falls, 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.
gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixDetail
.bookDotBook, LLCgmail.comView
Our mission is to establish .book as the most preferred top level domain for book consumers and the global book industry stakeholders that serve them. Our objectives are:
• To expressly democratize, simplify and cost-efficiently expand the discoverability of book titles and information about books.
• To enable authors, book publishers and other industry service providers to directly and intuitively be found by their prospective customers.
• To facilitate a contemporary path for continuous promotion and an extended digital shelf life for books.
• To empower stakeholders to leverage the low cost and massive reach of the internet as an alternative global platform for increased discovery and competition in the distribution of books.
• To promote a modern and universal semantic definition of ʹbookʹ that reinforces efforts by book industry stakeholders to market increasingly unique book products and services.
• To increase international trade by preserving the profitable growth of an innovative, yet defined, book publishing market within the larger information footprint and in accordance with existing contractual agreements.
• To help drive the decentralized, stakeholder-driven production of natural language words and phrases in .book domain strings that will help consumers around the world efficiently discover and purchase books.

People have been using books to organize the worldʹs information for centuries but only a small percentage of our global population has been afforded the chance to access these materials or even find out more about them. This is because book publishing and distribution models have been trapped in outdated supply chain practices and imbalanced economic models that have impeded a transparent book market and disadvantaged each of the industryʹs key stakeholders. But the internet, as a global information platform, has the power to improve economic sustainability for all book publishing stakeholders while providing maximum choice for consumers.

Universal discoverability and accessibility are the $29 billion book industryʹs greatest economic challenges. Independent bookstores, chain book retailers and even big-box stores cannot allocate sufficient physical space for print inventory to make true universal discovery and continuous availability of books economically feasible. A 2007 estimate of the total size of the frontlist, or current titles in print and marketed for sale, was approximately 1.7 million; yet in 2010, Google estimated there were about 130 million unique books in the world. By some estimates, up to 52 percent of frontlist titles are not even sold in bookstores and consumer are challenged to find them. Numerous books are merchandised sporadically via mail order and online catalogs, through book clubs, direct sales channels and in other nontraditional retail outlets. Some estimates suggest another 18-20 million books are scattered across a plethora of websites and discoverable only via serendipity. Moreover, retail stores that do carry books are famous for returning them, often at the publisherʹs expense. Typically 25-36 percent of all books printed and supplied to retailers for sale are physically returned to the publisher for a refund. The economics of a brick and mortar business model will always necessitate a limited catalog of mostly current and blockbuster titles. With a very low investment however, almost anyone who can read and write can access information about a book on the internet through a .book title domain or distribute such information directly to millions of people around the world, and at a price point they set for themselves.

Books are still the single best documented recording of the hearts and minds of the human race. We may live in an electronic age but the human output captured in books is worth preserving and making accessible to every interested citizen of the world who can access the internet. The internet has become the worldʹs ultimate global distribution platform. While the scarcity of shelf space once prevented the true lifetime value of a book from being realized, the adoption of .book title domains will allow any book to become instantly and abundantly available for an extended period of time, or even in perpetuity if the economics support it. This new system of .book TLDs will accelerate the ability of publishers and authors to develop more targeted domain schemas for faster and more cost-effective worldwide distribution for those not restricted by legacy territorial agreements.

Despite the fact that physical pages of books are slowly disappearing, the universal definition of the word ʹbookʹ is hardly foreign to global book consumers. The number of world nations who print the International Book Standard Number on the back of every printed book currently stands at 160 countries, according to the International ISBN Agency. As such, most consumers will not require training or rigorous bookmarking to search for books as the term ‘book’ is already a universally comprehended and highly regarded organizing label for information. Some industry pundits worry that the notion of a book is unraveling and quickly becoming a relic of the ancient past. Indeed the definition of a book as ʺthe matter printed between two coversʺ is fast becoming outdated. We are in the throes of a mighty transition from a print to an online publishing model. E-book sales in 2011 in the U.S. accounted for 21% of book sales, up from just 9 percent in the prior year. It has also been widely reported that Amazon sells more e-books than print books, a mere four years after launching the Kindle.

In February, market analyst Nielsen reported that e-book production in the UK outpaced hardcover production for the first time in 2011. Market researcher Gfk also found that e-book sales increased 77% in Germany over a one-year period, totaling EUR 38 million in 2011. According to a recent Harris Interactive poll, nearly three out of ten adults in the U.S. use an electronic device or tablet to read electronic books, up from 15 percent in July 2011. And eMarketer estimates that by 2014, the number of tablet users will rise to nearly 90 million, or 27.7 percent of the U.S. population. As Angela Bole, Deputy Executive Director at the BISG summarizes, the “e-book market is developing very quickly, with consumer attitudes and behavior changing over the course of months, rather than years.” Ironically, readers are embracing digital books in every flavor but still lack the ability to easily discover the full range of book titles that map to their interests. In 1925 there were 397 book publishers. Today there are over 80,000, with up to 10,000 new publishers entering the field every year. The adoption of new .book domains will lower the cost barrier for authors to publish their own works and reach their intended audiences. The New York Times reported in 2002 that “81 percent of people feel that they have a book in them…and should write it.” In the U.S. alone that statistic represents over 200 million people who might be persuaded to author a book in their lifetime. The definition of what constitutes a book and how it can be found must be allowed to evolve. An independent .book registry that is not specifically affiliated with one of the primary stakeholders is the best recipe for engendering consumer and stakeholder trust. Our goal as an impartial entity is to preserve the future of books and book publishing by uniting all industry participants around consumer-centric use cases without distorting some and preventing the development of others. Industry adoption of the .book domain will advantage all economic stakeholders by lowering the overall cost of matching each book with its intended reader. As Kevin Kelly, one of our more thoughtful thinkers of the modern digital age states: ʺA book is complete in the sense that it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.ʺ Now is the time for this next chapter