Q18A
Mission and Purpose of .soccer?
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 .soccer?
Soccer is a great leveller. Given the chance, anyone - from the poorest child to the world’s richest man - can play soccer. As it is arguably the most popular sport worldwide, passion is the essence of soccer, and we hope to capture this within .soccer largely using the valuable platform presented by the internet.
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 .soccer is to create a blank canvas for the online soccer sector set within a secure environment. The Applicant will achieve this by creating a consolidated, versatile and dedicated space for the soccer 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 soccer-related 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 soccer sector as there will be new channels available not yet fulfilled by current market offerings. This new environment will cause registrants to seek new and varied ways to separate themselves from the competition.
How will .soccer 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 .soccer 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
.soccer 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
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