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20(c) Provide a description of the community-based purpose of the applied-for gTLD

gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixDetail
.islamAsia Green IT System Bilgisayar San. ve Tic. Ltd. Sti.nsline.comView
• 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.
gTLDFull Legal NameE-mail suffixDetail
.sportSportAccordsportaccord.comView
20c Community-based purpose


20.c.1 Relationship between registrant categories and community members


The .sport TLD is to serve the collective interest of the all the members of the Sport Community. For the largest portion of members of the Sport community in numeric terms – sports practitioners, spectators and fans worldwide – the greatest value of .sport lies in the reliability and trustworthiness of the .sport name space. They want to see .sport domain names in the right hands rather than to own .sport domain names themselves.

The inverse analysis comes to the same conclusion: given the intrinsic scarcity of domain names (each name can only exist once), the objective of the .sport TLD cannot be to provide a domain name each to billions of Sport community members. An approach where all Sport community members could register any .sport name would destroy the value of all .sport names. Fair allocation of names would be impossible, community members would be pushed into sterile contention. In such an environment, all stakeholders would experience .sport as a nuisance rather than a useful resource.

For this reason, the .sport TLD is designed as an orderly, curated name space. Registrant categories are differentiated and confined to the two groups playing a primary role in the creation of Sport-related content of interest to the members of the Sport community:
- Sports Performers and Organizers, who produce the sport
content as publicly visible performers or organize and
structure it. (This group includes Athletes, Clubs,
Events, Governing Bodies.)
- Corporate Partners, who support the production of sport
content by providing resources in exchange for sport-
related visibility. (This group includes sponsors and media.)

These two groups of the Sport community create or help create content for the sport community and have a need for .sport domain names for that activity. They share an interest in making sure that the .sport name space is curated and controlled. The difference between the two groups lies in the relationship of their respective names, brands and slogans to Sport.
- Sports Performers and Organizers use names belonging to a
Sport context, by virtue of rights specific to Sport,
- Corporate Partners use names in a general trademark context
and relate their names to sport in exchange of sponsorship
or other contributions to performers and organizers.

Both the registration policies and the financial model of the .sport TLD takes this reality into account. It provides a basis for priority and contention resolution as well as for funding the effort of providing a curated name space. For instance, names in .sport need to take into account sport-specific naming rights which will take precedence over generic trademark rights in many cases. On the other hand, the Corporate Partners expect the sport organizers (which includes the organization of the .sport TLD itself) to reflect their role as Sport sponsors in the treatment the non-sport trademarks within the .sport TLD. As they derive value from the visibility created by Sport, they are ready to fund the bulk of the effort to curate the name space.

The Corporate Partners thus pay higher registration fees per domain in exchange for two value propositions: (1) the legitimate sport-related visibility and (2) the curated name space free from the need for defensive registrations. The substantially higher registration fee for corporate partners in itself further enhances their protection against trademark infringement. From a moral standpoint, it is also a form of contribution to sport in the sense of sponsorship, for the benefit of the entire Sport community. The Corporate Partners thus pay for the bulk of the effort to curate the name space and in doing so create value for themselves and the rest of the Sport community.


20.c.2. Description of Registrant Categories


Note: the Sport community is extremely diverse. This also applies to registrant categories, even though potential registrants are only a fraction of the Sport community. The following is a simplified description of the primary registrant categories. For the purpose of analysis in other parts of the present gTLD application, further simplifications are made. The future .sport registration policy will have detailed category descriptions. It will be adapted regularly to take into account experience and the evolution of the Sport community, under the guidance of the .sport Policy Advisory Board (PAB).

Athletes – Comprised primarily of elite and other top-level athletes competing at the highest levels of national and international sport.

Sports Clubs – Comprised of the sports clubs affiliated with officially-recognized Federations (lists of names, terms and acronyms specific to the .sport TLD needs will be compiled in the lexical research phase prior to launch).

Governing Bodies – includes governing bodies, international, continental, national, regional federations, associations, event organizing committees, major leagues, major (national) teams. By a simplifying extension, this category includes cities and venues for sports events.

Corporate Partners (Media and Brands) – includes media partners (including rights holders), corporate sponsors, sporting goods manufacturers etc.


20.c.3. Evolution over time of registrant access to .sport


Both the principle of prudence and the objective of optimal name allocation dictate that the policy should gradually evolve from strongest validation to gradually easier access, and from high prices to gradually lower prices. (The price differentiation between categories facilitates access where necessary.)

Registrants in the .sport TLD will include athletes, event organizers, sponsors, clubs and other organizations and individuals that share the values of Sport and actively and constructively participate in, organize or support sport activities.

Any person or organization can be a member of the Sport community by faithfully adhering to its values, be it as a practitioner, organizer, supporter or as a member of the audience.

The values of Sport include respect for life, health and human dignity, organization in the common interest, adherence to rules, honesty, courage, loyalty, equal opportunity, objective metrics and not counting luck as proof of achievement.