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

Prototypical answer:

Q18a) - Mission-Purpose

CORE Internet Council of Registrars submits this application for the .بازار TLD with the goal mission to provide a natural platform for enabling and promoting widespread adoption of e-commerce and local content in a linguistically diverse region where Arabic script is used to express local languages

The goals of the .بازار TLD are:

(a) to foster and strengthen the usage of the Arabic script and of the languages that use it in the on-line world;

(b) to increase the audience and awareness for websites using the Arabic script;

(c) to provide a platform for the development of the commercial space both online and offline in the areas where the Arabic script is used;

(d) to improve consumer choice by facilitating online marketing and the promotion of both internal and international economies of the areas where Arabic script is widely used.


The .بازار TLD will contribute to increase the usage of an IDN script, Arabic, and the linguistic and diversity of usages of the DNS, which are some of the main objectives of the gTLD process.
The pursuit of the above-mentioned general goals of the .بازار TLD will be informed by the following elements:

The word ʺبازارʺ denotes ‘a place of commercial activity’ in virtually all languages that use the Arabic script. This script is used across a large swath of territories including large parts of South, West, and Central Asia, as well as in North Africa, such as Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, Urdu and Malay (as written in Jawi). The word is understood by over 500 million people in territories where the national language is generally written in Arabic script.

While the word is probably of Persian origin, it has been adopted in the vernacular of many languages and regions albeit with slight variations in interpretation and with local flavour. It has been used variously to denote a shop, a market, an enclosed assemblage of alleys - each alley acting as a modern day ‘portal’- offering a particular set of products or services, a network of merchants and dealers, a seemingly chaotic congregation of peddlers, and other media of commercial activity.

A full meaningful word is of greater intuitive appeal and higher intrinsic value as a TLD in the language communities that use the Arabic script since acronyms and abbreviations are not in common use there.

While to date, most IDN TLDs, assigned or proposed, have been language-specific, a cross-language TLD such as .بازار offers an opportunity for a non-ASCII TLD to exhibit the potentialities inherent in non-Latin scripts to enhance the cause of the internationalization of the Internet across multiple geographies.

A technical merit of the proposed string is that it has no variants, so it can safely be adopted for the cross-language purpose at hand.

The proposed TLD .بازار recalls the original mission of .com, as spelled out in RFC 1591 by the late Jonathan Postel, to serve as an identifier for commercial entities. While the dearth of TLDs and the explosion of Internet derailed that original purpose and made .com synonymous with Internet presence, we hope that the semantic weight of .بازار and the opening up of TLD space will preserve the original focus of this TLD. We believe such a focus will endow added value to this identifier in search engines, while most open gTLDs hardly serve any purpose in Internet search.

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