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

Prototypical answer:

The .gal TLD application is submitted by Asociación puntoGAL in name and on behalf of the Galician linguistic and cultural community, which originated in Galicia, an area in northwestern Iberian Peninsula.
The goals of the .gal TLD are to:

(a) facilitate digital communications from, to and within the Galician linguistic and cultural community;
(b) provide a platform for the development in the digital space of the Galician linguistic and cultural community.
(c) strengthen the image of the Galician linguistic and cultural community in the on-line world.
(d) promote Galician language and culture and foster the development of the community.

This is to be achieved by:

(i) actively designing and developing the .gal TLD name space with a focus on the needs of the Galician linguistic and cultural community, involving cultural, welfare, business and public stakeholders;
(ii) allowing registrations of second-level domains in the Galician linguistic and cultural TLD by individuals and organizations with a bona fide nexus to the Galician linguistic and cultural community; the basic criterion to elucidate this bona fide nexus will be set by the requirement to use the domain names registered for the purpose of online communications in Galician and⁄or related to the Galician culture
(iii) operating the .gal TLD under the stewardship of the Galician linguistic and cultural community: As will be elaborated and detailed under 20 b), Asociación puntoGAL has the explicit support of the Galician public authorities, its most relevant cultural and professional institutions, private sector stakeholders, as well as the support of more than 12,500 individuals.

The .gal TLD will contribute to increase the linguistic and cultural diversity of the DNS, which is one of the main objectives of the gTLD process.
The above-mentioned general goals of the .gal TLD are further developed as follows:
- Meeting point of a lively cultural community: the .gal TLD will serve approximately four million people all around the globe who constitute a community with a rich cultural, social and economic life with unique characteristics and activity. This community is conformed by a language and a culture of great historical relevance and that is nowadays official in the community of Galicia. The Galician language has a remarkable amount of publications and translations and has a very dynamic Internet presence. As an example, Galician ranks as the 43rd language in entries on the Wikipedia.
- Contributing to the normalization of Galician language and to promote its culture: the .gal TLD will be a powerful tool to make Galician more visible and to improve its normalization. In the future, presence on the Internet will be as critical for small languages as having access to the media, education and publishing have been in the past.
- Improving language transmission between generations: The influence of the Internet is specially important for the youth. The .gal TLD will undoubtably help in the re-enhancement trend of the prestige of the Galician among its own speakers, especially among the younger users of the language. Because prestige is an essential factor for ensuring that older generations transmit their language to new generations, it can be said that the .gal TLD will contribute to improve intergenerational language transmission.
- Increasing benefits for Galician cultural industry and its economic life: the .gal TLD will contribute to highlight the public relevance of Galician creations and products both inwards and outwards, increasing their beneficial effects towards both the community and the cultural industries and economy, and offering a vehicle to foster the evolution of Galician cultural industries and economy. The .gal TLD will also serve as a recognizable item and a tool to smooth the cultural industriesʹ transition to the digital-based era.
- Increasing audience for websites in Galician: Internet search enginesʹ usage of the .gal TLD will serve as a tool to offer more accurate results in regards to content in Galician or related to Galician culture. This will help websites in Galician hits increase, improving their advertising revenues and, therefore, fostering lawful commercial visibility of the contents in Galician. Contents aggregators in Galician suffer from low visualization in search engines, who usually give higher ranking to websites in foreign languages, even for domestic content. Furthermore, there are no news search engines for news in Galician. The .gal TLD could be used both to improve search results in Galician and to develop new specific search engines.
- Improving consumer choice by facilitating online marketing and promoting Galician economy: the .gal TLD will help long tail companiesʹ strategies to focus the marketing of their products to the community in Galician or designed for the Galician cultural community. Logically, the companies’ adoption of the .gal TLD to address the Galician market will be key to measure how the .gal TLD has increased consumers’ choice. In addition, it will be easy to measure whether the .gal TLD has contributed to make available more products in Galician, especially Information Technologies and Internet solutions like, for example, news aggregators, directories, blogging platforms, etc.
- Promoting the relations with and within the diaspora: the .gal TLD will contribute to making the huge Galician diaspora more visible and to improve the relations between its nodes and different generations. Websites of Galician emigrants social centers could adopt the .gal TLD to highlight that they are part of a large community. Furthermore, these groups of emigrants will have an important asset at their availability in order to promote the transmission of the language to the younger generations, most of whom have never been in the original territory of the language and who use the Internet as their main source of entertainment and information. An efficient way to measure the .gal TLD performance will be to determine how many of the hundreds of Galician emigrants centers have adopted the new gTLD. At this moment, twenty of them have already joined Asociación puntoGAL. The .gal TLD will also encourage IT companies to launch products specifically designed for the diaspora community.
- A new type of linguistic gTLD: the Galician linguistic and cultural community has a relevant part of its members beyond Galician’s original and historical area of influence. The .gal TLD will be very useful for academics and ICANN to study whether this kind of linguistic and cultural gTLDs effectively contribute to the preservation of a culture among emigrants.
- The previous experience of a linguistic and cultural TLD, .CAT, offered the possibility to evaluate the beneficiary ripple effects of such a TLD and its significant contribution to the profile of the Catalan speaking community on the Internet. Asociación puntoGAL’s cooperation with Fundació puntCAT throughout ECLID - European Cultural and Linguistic Internet Domains - the working group which both entities are founding members of, will contribute to the benefit of the linguistic and cultural TLDs’ knowledge. More information about ECLID: http:⁄⁄www.eclid.eu⁄
- Reinvest all the benefits in the community: Asociación puntoGAL is a non for profit collective. According to the provisions of Asociación puntoGAL’s bylaws, that state that contributing to normalization of the language on the Information Technologies field is one of the objectives of the association, all the benefits from the registration of domains will feed a program to offer economic support to projects that promote Galician in information industry or on the Internet. Asociación puntoGAL will launch this support program after ensuring the financial stability of the new gTLD. Consequently, part of the benefits that online content and product in Galician already generate will return to the linguistic community

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