22 Describe proposed measures for protection of geographic names at the second and other levels in the applied-for gTLD

Prototypical answer:

he FRL registry will reserve all country-specific domain names that are indicated in the ICANN documentation. However, we do not expect any country (except the Dutch government) to be interested in a domain extension that is so specifically targeted at a province of The Netherlands.

The registry will reserve all names of Frisian cities, communities and villages. Together with the ʹFrisian Academyʹ, a specialist in the Frisian language, we have compiled and publishad a comprehensive list, in three ways:
- In the Frisian language, with IDN (e.g. feanwalsterwâl.frl or xn--feanwalsterwl-teb.frl)
- In the Frisian language, but without accents or special characters (e.g. feanwaldsterwal.frl)
- In the Dutch language (e.g. veenwoudsterwal.frl)

This list of reserved community, city and village domain names can be found at
http:⁄⁄metaregistrar.com⁄reserved-community-domain-names⁄

All these names will be added into the registry administration as ‘reserved’. A list of reserved names will be published as general accessible document on the website of the registry.
In the early sunrise phase, all cities and villages will receive notice about the opportunity to register their name with the .FRL registry. They will be able to register through any ICANN accredited registrar, provided that this registrar has entered into an agreement with the FRL registry.

Whenever a claim is made on a reserved domain name, the registry will use an independent law firm to check the claim on its validity. Every valid claim will give the authorities the choice of the 3 different domain names mentioned before.
Every authority that has succesfully claimed a domain name from the reserved list will receive an authcode for every claimed domain name. With this authcode the domain name can be registered through any ICANN-accredited registrar. The authcode will work only for the domain name it was issued to.


Upon a domain check, the reserved names will return the status string ‘reserved’. When the whois information is checked, these reserved names will not display whois information, nor will they be added to the DNS zone.

Protection of geographic names at the second level.
All geographic names specified by ICANN in specification 5 of the draft registry agreement will be listed as reserved and can only be registered through a special procedure.
A list of reserved country names can be found at http:⁄⁄metaregistrar.com⁄reserved-country-domain-names⁄
Any country-specific domain name that is brought to our attention by the GAC, and has passed GAC internal procedures, will be added to the list of reserved domain names, published on our website.

The ICANN specification 5 also mentions “the list of United Nations Member states in the 6 official languages of the United Nations”. To reserve these names will technically not be possible, since many of those names (russian, chinese) contain characters that are not supported by the registry. They cannot be registered with the FRL registry anyway.

Since this TLD is targeted at a specific part of a small country, we expect very little interest for country-named domain names. Even with a very large registry like .INFO many country names are still reserved. And many countries have no interest in the English version of their country name.

Any country or region interested in obtaining their own domain name that is on the reserved list, will first have to be approved by the GAC and ICANN. Only after these approvals the second-level domain name will be released to the requestor.

Similar gTLD applications: (0)