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

Prototypical answer:

The .FRL domain extension is targeted at Frisian people living in Friesland, Frisians living in other part of the Netherlands, and Frisians living abroad and wanting to identify themselves with the Frisian culture and heritage.

This means that the FRL top-level domain will serve the Frisians not only in the province (between 600.000 and 700.000 people), but also the Frisians that have moved into the rest of The Netherlands or abroad. Also, the northerns parts of Germany have a Frisian community that strongly identifies with the Frisians in The Netherlands. The general feeling is that people from Friesland will stay Frisian for their whole lives, and are very willing to identify themselves with anything coming from Friesland.

The Netherlands are populated with about 17.000.000 people, and the .NL registry holds almost 5.000.000 second-level domain names. If we extrapolate these numbers to the Frisian population, we can expect conservatively 100.000 second-level registrations, but 200.000 registrations would be very possible from the inhabitants of Friesland alone. And that is not counting the Frisians living in other parts of the Netherlands or Frisians living abroad. Add this to the fact that most Frisian names have 3 means of spelling: Dutch spelling, Frisian spelling without accents and Frisian spelling with accents, this all adds up to a very valid business case for a gTLD.

When enough Frisians adopt a .FRL domain name, this TLD will serve as glue between the Frisians living in Friesland and the Frisians living elsewhere, giving the people living abroad a means to visually identify themselves with the Frisian community in Friesland.

An additional benefit to using a .FRL tld is the use of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). The Frisian language contains many words that require special characters to be spelled correctly. For example, the government of Friesland is reachable under www.fryslan.nl, however the correct spelling would be fryslân.nl. Since SIDN has not rolled out IDN support yet, this domain name is not possible. With the use of new gTLDs, the province will be able to register the domain name fryslân.frl. We expect a boost in websites that feature the Frisian language, and many website owners wanting to register not only the IDN variant but also the variant without special characters, if only to be able to send and receive e-mail correctly.

The whois services of the FRL registry will adhere to the Dutch privacy laws. This means that for the public whois services only a limited amount of data will be shown. Any party having a legitimate right to all the whois information will be able to contact the registry and gain access to the private whois service. Connected registrars will also have access to the private whois service to enable them to execute the domain transfer policies correctly.

The web-based whois service will show more information than the publicly available port 43 whois, but will be protected with a captcha to prevent harvesting of data.

Registration of .FRL domain names will be open and unrestricted to any ICANN-accredited registrar. There are no intentions to restrict registration to people originating from Friesland only, because many Frisian people live in other parts of The Netherlands or Germany or have moved abroad. It is these people we want to give the chance of identifying with the Frisian community by registering a .FRL domain name.

As stated in the ICANN policies, all names like example.frl, www.frl, iris.frl, nic.frl and whois.frl will be reserved in the domain name system, as all the names of countries and territories that are specified in the ICANN newGtld documentation. Domain names with hyphens are allowed, but no two hyphens may be next to each other in a domain name. This way, domain names starting with xn—will not be accepted by the registry.

Numbers in domain names are allowed. Domain names can start or end with any number.
All 1 character and 2-character domain names are reserved, and can only be released after ICANN approval.

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) will be allowed, but only the characters that relate to the Frisian and Dutch languages. Since no character table exists in the IANA tables with that specification, a new table will be added.

In addition to this, all names of Frisian villages and cities will be reserved, where necessary in three variants: Dutch language, Frisian language and Frisian language with special characters. We are working together with the Frisian Academy for a exhaustive list of names. Together with the Province Fryslân we will encourage all local governments to claim their domain name(s), we will use an external party to verify those claims.

Every domain name can be registered for a period of 1 to 10 years. At this time, no discount pricing has been established for registrations longer than 1 year.

The sunrise and landrush stages will be performed as follows:
1. Sunrise for trademark holders and companies
Any party holding a trademark or registered name will be able to apply for domain names in the .FRL gTLD. Each claim will be checked and verified by an external party, capable of verifying these claims. Whenever a claim is approved, the trademark holder will receive an authcode for that specific domain name.
We do not expect many trademark holders wanting to claim a domain name in this period of time, so multiple applications for the same domain name will be handled on a first-come first-serve basis. That is, after the documentation supporting the claims have been verified.
At the same time, all companies and institutions will receive a letter with their company domain name that can be claimed. This will raise awareness with the new TLD. The companies and institutions can use the authcode in that letter to register their domain name. If they want to register more domain names, they will have to use the next sunrise (for the Frisian community) or the open registration (landrush) period.


2. Sunrise for the Frisian community
Worldwide acceptance of the .FRL tld will stand or fall with acceptance by the Frisian community itself. We have agreed with the Provincie Fryslân that the FRL registry will supply all addresses in Friesland with discount codes to pre-register a domain name. Each physical address will receive 2 discount codes: one for themselves and one to use for a relative or friend abroad. This way we will raise the awareness of .FRL existence, and let all people in Friesland (and Frisians abroad) know that this extension is available for registration. The discount code will give a discount of at least 50% on the regular domain name price.

The discount codes will be accepted by the EPP server of the registry, and can be used by any ICANN accredited registrar approved and connected to the .FRL registry. We will encourage people asking for the .FRL extension with their local domain name provider, because every extra selling point of domain names will benefit the whole .FRL registry.

Multiple registrations for the same domain name will be handled on a first-come first-served basis.

3. General availability
After the Frisian pre-registration, registration will open up without use of coupon codes. No restrictions are imposed on the registrants; anyone will be able to register a .FRL domain name.

Multiple registrations for the same domain name will be handled on a first-come first-served basis.

Since the Frisian community and the Provincie Fryslân are strong supporters of the independent Frisian language, our sister company Mijndomein.nl has plans to open a domain name registration page in the Frisian language.

The Provincie Fryslân has already opened a page on their website to ask the Frisian people if they are willing to register a FRL domain name, and the name of their registrar. This information will be used by the registry to actively contact the Frisian domain name registration and hosting companies and get them connected with the Frisian Top-Level domain either with their own ICANN accreditation or via a reseller agreement with one of the connected registrars.

The registry is already in contact with the (currently 9) ICANN accredited registrars in The Netherlands, and has received several intentions to connect with the registry and sell FRL domain names.

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