gTLD	Full Legal Name	E-mail suffix	Detail
.islam	Asia Green IT System Bilgisayar San. ve Tic. Ltd. Sti.	nsline.com	View

• Intended registrants in the TLD.

The .Islam gTLD is intended for Muslim faithful who wish to promote, participate or learn about Islam and its various facets, its affect on the daily life of the people around the word, its history, its law and jurisprudence and the rich and diverse culture that surrounds it. Thus, any well-intentioned Muslim who wants to supply such content, or do business based around it, will be able to operate a domain under the .ISLAM gTLD.

• Intended end-users of the TLD.


For a fifth of the worldʹs population, Islam is both a religion and a complete way of life. Muslims follow a religion of peace, mercy, and forgiveness - and the majority have nothing to do with the extremely grave events which have come to be associated with their faith. Every Muslim, and indeed a great many non-Muslims, in the world can benefit from .ISLAM websites and the wealth of information and services that it is anticipated will offered by them. The diversity of the .ISLAM gTLD’s offering would be wide enough to cover almost all audiences and their Islam-related needs, considering that all .ISLAM websites will be promoting Islam in some form.

Within all of these populations, the specific intended end users of the .ISLAM gTLD are manifold, and include:

People with ties to Islamic heritage: This includes a significant percentage of both the population of Muslim countries and also with other nations.
Individual Muslims: As demonstrated above, this includes hundreds of millions of individuals around the world.
Students: Those learning about different aspects of Islam, its concepts, its laws, its culture and heritage and its many other facets would benefit from increased resources online that would help them to learn and develop.
Islamic businesses: as in every community, Muslims undertake a great deal of business both within their community and also with external groups. The ability to link their business to the word Islam will therefore be of significant importance to Muslim businesses, both to denote a Muslim-based business and also as a source of pride in being known as such. Indeed, the word Islam is already exceptionally popular within online business – and the word alone yields more than 500 million hits when searched.
All sects: As described above, the main two sects of the Muslim community are Sunnis and Shias – both of whom will be welcome to operate under the .ISLAM gTLD, alongside all other Muslim sects.

It is hoped that not only will these intended users derive individual benefit from the existence of a .ISLAM community, but that they will also contribute in turn. This should create a group benefit, which will in turn feed back in to individual benefits – establishing a beneficial cycle.


• Related activities the applicant has carried out or intends to carry out in service of this purpose.

Anticipating the diversification of TLDs now being realized, and the consequent introduction of an Islamic-specific online space, AGITSys has been working with a wide variety of related parties for several years in preparation, and will continue to do so going forward. A key element for the success of the .ISLAM gTLD is a strong and interactive community, which Muslims around the world are proud to associate with and keen to contribute to. To ensure this, AGITSys will sponsor community outreach and marketing, in order to raise awareness of the forthcoming possibilities. These possibilities are also highly appealing for Islamic businesses, and as such AGITSys will engage in dialogue with those businesses, and industry chiefs, regarding their ideas for how the .ISLAM gTLD will take shape, and what they intend to subsequently give back to it.
Quality content will also be fundamental to a thriving .ISLAM community, especially because AGITSys is committed to ensuring that .ISLAM is populated by quality second-level domain offerings. With this in mind, AGITSys will be talking with those most likely to contribute quality content, from news and media agencies to academics and libraries (who will be able to digitize Islamic materials and then distribute them online comprehensively for the first time) about how they can and will contribute, and what AGITSys can do to facilitate this process.
Ultimately, however, religion will always be the most important element for a successful .ISLAM community online. The entire gTLD concept is designed as a place of online respect; almost worship, for those of Islamic faith. As such, the involvement, blessing and feedback of the Islamic religious community is fundamentally important. Aware of this, AGITSys has been in prolonged and continued contact with important religious figures – asking them what they want to see and how they would like to see it done, whilst also encouraging them to spread the word and prepare themselves. This should mean that when the .ISLAM gTLD comes online, there will be a large swathe of information posted almost immediately – therefore instantly creating a rewarding user experience.

• Explanation of how the purpose is of a lasting nature.

The community that will be served by .ISLAM--growing as it has out of the Muslims community--has thrived and grown for more than a millennium. Remarkably, it has done so largely without the level of connection online found within Western cultures. This existing community interconnection speaks to the cultural staying power of the Islamic community and the many ways it enriches world culture.

With the adoption of a .ISLAM community, this robust group will be further empowered to interconnect and grow, allowing it to take its equal place on the Internet stage. The community thrives now, but will reach new heights through the .ISLAM gTLD.

The growth of the .ISLAM gTLD will be driven by what economists refer to as the network effect. A network effect occurs when a service becomes more popular as more individuals adopt it. A significant portion of the serviceʹs value stems directly from the increased adoption and usage of the service. Historically the network effect is most powerful in tools of interconnection. The telegraph and telephone were technologies that grew exponentially due to the network effect. The Internet itself is an example of that phenomenon, as seen by the rapid upward growth curve of Internet penetration, broadband speeds, and web site creation. ICANNʹs data on the growth of .COM is an example of the network effect, and now it is seen in social-media platforms atop the Internet, such as Facebook and Twitter.

As more sites offer information, services, and opportunities for interconnection to the .ISLAM community as a whole, more members of the community will navigate to those sites. Many of those will provide their own content, and their activity there will spark further growth of second-level .ISLAM domains. At some point, information and service providers currently not offering sites will see the demand for .ISLAM-related content and will migrate their offerings to .ISLAM sites as well, furthering the offerings to the community and further driving community members to .ISLAM sites. The future benefits of interlinking this diverse and global community are incalculable but immense.

gTLD	Full Legal Name	E-mail suffix	Detail
.рус	Rusnames Limited	gmail.com	View

• Intended registrants in the TLD.

The .РУС gTLD is intended for people who wish to promote, participate or learn about the Rus heritage, Rus language and Rus culture and who use it in any way in their daily lives.

• Intended end-users of the TLD.

While the community, as demonstrated above, has a global reach, Russian and Russian language speakers comprise a significant percentage of the community. Russia has the eight largest population in the world, constituting 143 million people. Its 17 million square kilometers cover 40% of Europe and all of northern Asia, spanning nine time zones, more than any other nation.

Russian and Russian language speakers can be found in many places across the globe. Russians, for example, form one of the official ethnic groups recognized within China by its government. There are also at least 750,000 immigrants in Israel who relocated there from former Soviet Union countries, according to the 1999 census. Sizable Russian communities can be found across North America, in large cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Denver, Miami, and Toronto. It is estimated that as many as 750,000 Russian-speaking individuals live in the United States. Many of these Russian communities are served by Cyrillic-script newspapers and periodicals, but the readers of those publications would welcome greater connection to their fellow citizens online through .РУС sites.

The community is far broader than Russians who live in countries where Russian is an official language, however (as explained above). The intended end users of the .РУС gTLD are many-fold:

• Cyrillic-language speakers with ties to the Rus heritage: This would include a significant percentage of the population of Russia along with other nations such as Ukraine and Belarus.
• Cyrillic-language native speakers: As demonstrated above, this includes millions of individuals in Europe and Asia as well as other continents.
• Cyrillic-language students: Those learning Cyrillic as a foreign language would benefit from increased resources online that would help them learn and grow in their new language.

A list of many of the Cyrillic script languages, many related to Russian, categorized by type, includes:

• Slavic languages: Belarusan, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.
• Indo-European languages: Ossetic, Romani, Shughni, Tajik, Tat, Yaghnobi.
• Romance languages: Primarily Romanian, with some influence on Ladino.
• Caucuses languages: Abaza, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Avar, Chechen, Dargwa, Kabardian, Lak, Lezgian, Tabassaran.
• Mongolian languages: Buryat, Kalmyk, Mongolian.
• Tungusic languages: Even, Nanai, Udihe.
• Turkish languages: Altay, Azerbaijani (before 1991), Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz (officially prior to 1990s but still in regular use), Kazakh, Karachay, Khakas, Kumyk, Kyrgyz, Nogai, Tatar, Turkmen (prior to 1994 but still in regular use), and Tuvan.
• Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages: Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen, Uyghur-Cyrillic, Yakut.
• Uralic languages: Erzya, Khanty, Komi, Mansi, Mari, Moksha, Nenets, Sami, Selkup, Udmurt.
• Eskimo-Aleut languages: Aleut, Alutiq, Yuit.
• Others: Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Dungan, Ket, Nivkh, Tlingit, Yukaghir.

While many of these countries no longer recognize Russian as the official language, a large percentage of the population still uses the Russian Language and Cyrillic script.

• Related activities the applicant has carried out or intends to carry out in service of this purpose.

The team behind RusNames has for years worked to ensure the Internet contains robust materials in the Cyrillic script, and is uniquely positioned to continue to do so. Finding itself at the center of the community, its mission is to find new ways to harness the power of the Internet to more thoroughly connect members of the community across borders and cultures. Encouraging the growth of second-level .РУС domains will ensure this interconnection.

The team behind RusNames has led international efforts to introduce Cyrillic text online, working across borders and leading collaborative efforts. No other organization has been as active in ICANN processes when it comes to facilitating a full-featured Cyrillic web experience, complete with corresponding TLDs. We have been attending ICANN meetings since 2003, and have engaged in numerous committees and working groups.

The team behind RusNames helped form the Cyrillic Script Working Group in 2002, and through this group developed a Cyrillic language IDN Table. A few years later we helped develop a core document through the GNSO IDN Expert Group defining how the Cyrillic alphabet would work online. We have played leadership roles in the Cyrillic Languages Internet Names Consortium (CyrLINC), which evolved from MINC, working across countries and regions using Cyrillic script. Similarly, from 2006 to 2007 we participated in a policy process regarding new TLDs with the GNSO Internationalized Domain Names Working Group as the only representatives of Russian Cyrillic concerns. Since 2008, RusNames has worked with the GNSO Policy Process Steering Committee and its Working Group-Work Team. More recently, RusNames officials assumed leadership roles, including Chairman, in the Cyrillic Case Study Team after it was launched by ICANN and produced a final report. We have also participated in the IDN Variant TLDs Issues Project, in which Cyrillic is one of the six common scripts being examined for inclusion in the DNS Root Zone.

No entity for the past decade has done more to promote and advance the development of Cyrillic online, and has done so in anticipation of ICANNʹs eventual decision to grant Cyrillic domain names. RusNames stands ready to shepherd .РУС into the online community.

• Explanation of how the purpose is of a lasting nature.

The community that will be served by .РУС--growing as it has out of the Rus people and the Cyrillic alphabet--has thrived and grown for more than a millennia. Remarkably, it has done so largely without the level of online connection found with English-speaking cultures. This existing community interconnection speaks to the cultural staying power of the community and the many ways it enriches world culture.

With the adoption of a .РУС community, this robust group will be further empowered to interconnect and grow, allowing it to take its equal place on the Internet stage. The community thrives now, but will reach new heights with a .РУС gTLD.

The growth of the .РУС gTLD will be driven by what economists refer to as the network effect. A network effect occurs when a service becomes more popular as more individuals adopt it. A significant portion of the serviceʹs value stems directly from the increased adoption and usage of the service. Historically the network effect is most powerful in tools of interconnection. The Internet itself is an example of that phenomenon, as seen by the rapid upward growth curve of Internet penetration, broadband speeds, and web site creation. ICANNʹs data on the growth of .COM is an example of the network effect, and now it is seen in social-media platforms atop the Internet, such as Facebook and Twitter.

As more sites offer information, services, and opportunities for interconnection to the .РУС community as a whole, more members of the community will navigate to those sites. Many of those will provide their own content, and their activity there will spark further growth of second-level .РУС domains. At some point, information and service providers currently not offering sites in Cyrillic will see the demand for .РУС-related content and will migrate their offerings to .РУС sites as well, furthering the offerings to the community and further driving community members to .РУС sites. The future benefits of interlinking this diverse and global community are incalculable but immense.