18(b) How do you expect that your proposed gTLD will benefit registrants, Internet users, and others?

Prototypical answer:

The key benefits to all stakeholders of the .madrid TLD will derive from the intrinsic link between the TLD string and the Madrid community: from the specificity of its policies to the needs of the Madrid community; from the ability to design and develop the name space from a clean sheet and from the clear accountability to the .madrid Registry to the Region of Madrid, and through it, as its elected administration, to all its citizens, registrants or not.

The specificity to Madrid of the both the string and the .madrid policies shall enable registrants to communicate in a way that demonstrates their commitment to the Madrid community. A potential registrant interested in a given .madrid domain name is more likely to be able to register it because the potential of contention from other areas is reduced.

The ability to design and develop a planned portion of the name space as a trusted space creates a web of predictable and memorable names that will facilitate access to key resources. Enhancing expectedness, predictability and accuracy for all users navigating that name space, not just .madrid registrants.


i. i. What is the goal of your proposed gTLD in terms of areas of specialty, service levels, or reputation?


The goal of the .madrid TLD in terms of specialty, is the focus on the needs of the Madrid community. Service levels will match or exceed the high-end of currently existing TLDs. The .madrid Registry will vigorously build and defend the reputation of .madrid as an orderly and progressive TLD for the Madrid community.

Within the last years, the Region of Madrid has undergone tremendous efforts in order to facilitate access to the public services offered via the Internet, foster access among citizens and promote the development of IT companies.

The Madrid area leads the telematics services provision in Spain. The institutional portal madrid.org had a total of 36 million accesses and a total of 176 million site visits in 2011. The Comunidad de Madrid (the regional administration) made over 25 million of institutional information transactions with citizens during the same year. The service levels that the administration pretends to provide with .madrid, match perfectly with their policies of public offerings through the net.

With the acquisition of the .madrid TLD, the Region of Madrid will be able to centralize in thematic domains all the services that it provides to the community as a regional organism such as: educate.madrid (educa.madrid), health.madrid (salud.madrid), sports.madrid (deportes.madrid), culture.madrid (cultura.madrid) or justice.madrid (justicia.madrid). Likewise, there will also be a provision of information from the municipalities of the different cities of our region or local institutions, gaining in simplicity, clarity and quality of service.

The .madrid will be a TLD with immediate recognition, not only because the historic reference as a capital city and therefore seat of the General Administration, but also because nowadays the city is gifted with the attractiveness of being Spain’s leading business center, hub for many multinational corporations’ headquarters and focal point for world-leading trade shows and conferences (such as FITUR for tourism, Arco for art, and the Cibeles Fashion Week).

In terms of reputation, .madridenjoys the competitive advantage of being associated with the brand “España” (Spain), a new initiative promoted by the Spanish Government that will be launched in the near future. This new initiative pretends to value all those assets that are considered internationally as “Spain” and that will be represented by leading Spanish corporations with international presence, the success of our elite athletes and the Spanish language for its worldwide usage.

With the application of the .madrid TLD, the Region of Madrid aims to promote the brand ʺMadridʺ, fact that consequently will help to promote the brand ʺSpainʺ internationally.

The .madrid TLD will help the Region of Madrid to strengthen and empower the visibility of Madrid worldwide, placing it firmly both, in the national and international spheres.
.madrid pretends to become the “official” Internet resource for citizens, institutional organisms and visitors. Moreover, we would like that .madrid becomes a large virtual call space where to concentrate ideas that improve the electronic service for the Region’s citizens, to support cultural groups, to improve security and trust, to encourage citizens to interact with public institutions, civil servants and elected representatives approaching institutional organisms and public figures to the community.


ii. What do you anticipate your proposed gTLD will add to the current space, in terms of competition, differentiation, or innovation?


Taking into account that the .madrid TLD is a unique digital resource with a wide global attractiveness, the Region of Madrid has decided to share it with the Internet community, with the purpose of collaborating and enhancing the presence of public, business and civil society interests related to that geographic area.

The .madrid TLD is the perfect platform where the Internet users from Madrid can build their social and business platforms or simply a virtual place to gather and exchange ideas representing a TLD that reinforces the common identity that time integrates at the same individuals from different cultures and races that cohabit within the Madrid area.

The Madrid area represents the biggest economy of Spain by its GDP; it has a population of almost 7 million inhabitants, over 3 million living in the capital city, Madrid, the biggest city in Spain, sixth in Europe and 28th in the world. Serving a metropolitan area with a considerable economic and cultural significance, the .madrid TLD fills up a large gap in terms of customer choice. From a competitive standpoint, it creates a level playing field with respect to the market power of large unspecific TLDs. It is naturally differentiated both by its scope, by its governance model and by its intrinsic meaning from other TLDs.

Innovation is greatly enhanced by the proactive structured development of the .madrid name space. The development process involves an open process with calls for proposals for purpose-built localized services based on designated portions of the .madrid name space. This approach helps use innovative potential worldwide for the benefit of the Madrid area and for the advancement of the global Internet.

One of the most important advantages of the .madrid TLD will be to facilitate the access to the general services of the Region of Madrid. All administrative procedures, such as health, public aid, activities, culture, tourism, sport, social services, general information, etc. will be centralized within domain names .madrid. This will simplify the access of the Region of Madrid’s citizens to the ʺeAdministrationʺ.

We should not forget the sports-related projection of the area, including its successive candidatures for becoming host of the Olympic Games in 2012, 2016 and 2020; its international representation of its soccer, basketball and handball clubs, besides the organization of recognized sport events.

The existence of the .madrid TLD will reinforce the brand in this particular aspect since all the domains related to the sport community, sport events or the Olympic candidature will be branded under the .madrid TLD, giving the area a unified image worldwide.


iii. What goals does your proposed gTLD have in terms of user experience?

Compared to most existing TLDs, the .madrid user experience will greatly enhance predictability and memorability of domain names. The community-based focus, the orderly development process and strong intellectual property support, ensure that users will generally find the services they are looking for under the names they intuitively tend to use for them.

The .madrid TLD will assure to all public institutions of the Region of Madrid the possibility of having a domain name that identifies them as member of the public administration and the Madrid area. Municipalities of the Region of Madrid will be able to request domain names such as ʺcity.madridʺ, enabling a unified criteria on the internet.

Organizations like ʺMadrid 2020ʺ (responsible body of the candidacy of Madrid for hosting the Olympic Games in 2020), may use domains like ʺ2020.madrid ʺ or ʺolympicgames.madrid ʺ, enhancing and promoting this appellation. Hence, Internet users will find intuitively the web page dedicated to the Olympic Candidature of Madrid.

The .madrid TLD will also promote global sport events internationally renowned such as the ʺtenisopen.madridʺ.

Users will have greater comfort on the context of naming variants (redirected to the canonical forms) will systematically be activated. Users in the Madrid community will be able to get accustomed to the predictability of .madrid domain names. As a result, they also minimize the chances of stumbling upon typo-squatting, robotized pay-per-click traps or domain-for-sale pages.

The .madrid TLD is attractive itself because it will be of the interest of all those Internet users who would like to link their researches, not only business related but also tourism, gastronomy or leisure in general. Tourism is one of the mainstays of the area’s economy, reaching almost its 10% of GDP and it represents the 11,5% of the total of visitors within the country. From the 10,4 million visitors the region had in 2011, over 50% made their reservations online, a fact that clearly indicates the enormous potential that .madrid has in the tourism sector and its possibilities.


The clear focus towards the security policies for the consumer protection, procedural safeguards and the growing resources dedicated to security within the online transactions sphere, have generated enough trust for having had a very important growth within the last years of the commercial transactions online. The .madrid TLD will allow Internet users to issue their online transactions on a secure way increasing Madrid’s residents and visitors loyalty and trust.

The.madrid TLD will be a safe and highly reliable domain name that will be have the best technical and technological resources to ensure the online safety and security of .madrid users. The Region of Madrid is well aware of the vulnerability of the organizations towards potential cyber-attacks, and therefore will reinforce the measures in order to minimize these risks, ensuring the rights of companies, brands, government agencies and other registrants.

Summarizing, the Region of Madrid will take advantage of the opportunities of the new TLD, contributing to the community in the following ways:

* Internet users will clearly spot the domain names belonging to the Public Administration and will be able to find all the relevant information within the different domain names: Madrid.madrid as main domain name and many others such as procedures.madrid (tramites.madrid), health.madrid (salud.madrid), sports.madrid (deporte.madrid), tourism.madrid (turismo.madrid), culture.madrid (cultura.madrid), education.madrid (educacion.madrid) as examples of domain names that will have all the information gathered in their sites (and not spread out in different domain names).
* Citizens will gain in trust and security. The .madrid domain names will be managed by the Region of Madrid. Proactive measures will be adopted by the Registry Operator in order to ensure the highest level of domain name registrations data accuracy. Citizens will be certain that the domain name they are using to do all their administrative procedures are secured domains controlled by the pertinent entity. Malicious behavior activities affecting domain names under the .madrid TLD name space will be prevented through a strong commitment to both proactive and reactive surveillance by the Registry Operator.

- The community of users in general will easily find public institutions, organizations or private companies registered under the .madrid TLD, given that this will be a characteristic typology for companies or organizations located in Madrid. This fact does not only benefit citizens from Madrid, who will be able to easily find companies or institutions located in their geographical area, but will also be in the interest of citizens from rest of the country and even more for companies or visitors from other countries wishing to visit the region of Madrid (tourism promotion) or establish business relationships with companies located in Madrid (international commerce promotion), fact that is very important for the business promotion encouraged by business organizations and in particular by the Chamber of Commerce of Madrid.


iv. Provide a complete description of the applicant’s intended registration policies in support of the goals listed above.

The registration policies are differentiated between pre-launch phase, launch phase and general availability.

During pre-launch, projects and content provision commitments are actively sought and negotiated, especially for key public-interest portions of the name space. All potential registrants and mandate holders are subject to screening, thorough pre-validation, and very strict rules on using the .madrid names to promote the TLD adoption. There will be a clear and low limit on the numbers of pre-launch names.

During the launch phase, all registrations are pre-validated; launch phase pre-validation depends on priority status (public service, trademark, civil society sector, no prior rights) but will always involve community nexus.

At general availability, community nexus is subject to post-validation throughout an extensive compliance program. The ongoing compliance program will regularly be adapted to current needs based on experience and audit findings. Community nexus validation combined with strong protection of trademarks helps stamp out cybersquatting and abusive registrations.

Please see answers to Questions 18 (c) and 20 below for a much more detailed description of these phases, and its requirements.

v. Will your proposed gTLD impose any measures for protecting the privacy or confidential information of registrants or users? If so, please describe any such measures.

The Region of Madrid recognizes first-hand that this is a relevant issue and an evolving area of law in which there is no international standard. The protection of privacy and confidential information of registrants and users will comply with applicable Law, in particular the European Data Protection framework and the Spanish Personal Data Protection legislation. Within the bounds of applicable regulations, the Registry will implement anti-data mining measures by way of rate limitation, authenticated access or white-listing⁄black-listing, as well as tools to prevent unauthorized recourse to repetitive automated access.

The .madrid Registry also intends to incorporate contractual language in its Registry Registrar Agreement (RRA) model after language which has been included in the template Registry Agreement and which has been successfully utilized by existing ICANN gTLD registry operators. Specifically, Registry Operator shall notify Registrar of the purposes for which Personal Data submitted to Registry Operation by Registrar is collected, the intended recipients (or categories of recipients) of such Personal Data, and the mechanism for access to and correction of such Personal Data. Registry Operator shall take reasonable steps to protect Personal Data from loss, misuse, unauthorized disclosure, alteration or destruction. Registry Operator shall not use or authorize the use of Personal Data in a way that is incompatible with the notice provided to registrars. Registry Operator may from time to time use the demographic data collected for statistical analysis, provided that this analysis will not disclose individual Personal Data and provided that such use is compatible with the notice provided to registrars regarding the purpose and procedures for such use.

Finally, the Region of Madrid (Comunidad de Madrid, as the Government of the Madrid Region) will propose to ICANN through the Registry Agreement negotiations, as the Draft Base Agreement contains specific language on Governments and mandatory national legislation, a Whois service that allows individual registrants to opt-out from publishing their personal contact data, as other existing gTLD Registries have done. If this option is not available during the contractual negotiations, the.madrid would submit such proposal after delegation, though the New Registry Services procedure.


vi. Describe whether and in what ways outreach and communications will help to achieve your projected benefits.

The .madrid TLD will have specific outreach programs adapted to each phase of its introduction.

The pre-launch negotiations involve calls for projects by innovators and pioneer users (of the Region). They foster the intuitive usability of the .madrid TLD with a focus on the needs of the Madrid area. Once these domain names are active, they become an outreach mechanism in their own rights because they establish the touch-and-feel of the .madrid TLD in the user’s minds.

The launch phase will involve outreach mechanisms that specifically leverage participation by the regional public services, locally relevant trademarks and actors.

Promotion codes distributed through community-specific channels are a form outreach available at any time. They are also a low-cost method to achieve community nexus and to prevent abusive registrations.
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