hotel | .Nxt | Internet policy and governance

hotel

Generic

Initial Evaluation

Priority number:

1215

Government objection(s):

France

Germany

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Applicant

Top Level Domain Holdings Limited

Craigmuir Chambers Road Town

Tortola

VG 1110

Virgin Islands, British

Phone:

+350 200 610 61

Fax:

+350 200 510 71

http://www.tldh.org

Government objection(s)

Explanation:

*** France ***
The French government is not opposed to the creation of generic extensions on Internet like hotel or “hotels” (and to any translation of theses terms in another foreign languages, for example “hoteles” in Spanish or “hoteis “in Portuguese), but suggests that these extensions be only reserved to hotel businesses, in order to guarantee a clear information to the customer. The quality of an accurate information for the customer and a large choice of hotel accommodation must be guaranteed to the customer. For the French authorities, this issue a represents a significant economic stake. France is the first world tourism destination, with 81 million tourists having visited the country in 2011, and tourism business represents 7 % of the French GDP. The hotel industry represents a yearly turnover of 15 billion euros. The quality of hotel accommodation is a crucial parameter for tourists when they chose a country to visit and is part of the image of France as a top tourism destination in the world. Each hotel business should have the right, guaranteed by ICANN, to use the term “hotel” as generic top level domain (“gTLD”) for promoting its commercial market strategy, and this right should be only reserved to the suppliers of hotel services.

*** Germany ***
In the view of the GAC representatives of Germany, the applications for “.hotel”, “.hotels” and “.hoteis” should definitely be treated together in ICANN’s evaluation process.

Reason/Rationale:

*** France ***
In France, as well as in many other countries, the majority of hotel businesses are ranked according to a number of “stars” being function of the quality the services offered to the customer. In France, the way this ranking is delivered by the tourism agency “Atout France”, is organized by the legal provisions of the tourism code . With the term “hotel” connected to a quality ranking, the customer is well informed on the genuine quality of hotel services. In this context, the term “hotel“ or any correlated generic extension on internet (“gTLD”), should be reserved (through for example the process of ”a closed registry”), to businesses offering themselves hotel services in order to avoid any confusion in the customers’ mind. The guarantee of a clear information of the customer on hotel accommodation services is the best way to promote tourism industry, not only in France but also in the whole world, through a fair competition of hotel businesses. Behind the term hotel as a generic denomination (‘gTLD,”), any customer in the world must have the guarantee that will be directly connected to an hotel.

*** Germany ***
The proposed strings, .hotels/ .hotel/ .hoteis are common generic terms relating to a market sector.

Restricting common generic strings for the exclusive use of a single entity could have unintended consequences, including a negative impact on competition.

Early warnings provide a mechanism to initiate a discussion between a government and an applicant on particular issues or questions. It is intended that a constructive dialogue through this process will assist applicants to better understand the concerns of governments, and help governments to better understand the planned operation of proposed gTLDs.

Possible Remediation:

*** Germany ***
GAC Member(s) to identify possible remediation steps to be taken by the applicant
The applicants for “.hotel”, “.hotels” and “.hoteis” should specify transparent criteria for third party access to the TLD. These criteria should be appropriate for the types of risk associated with the TLD, and should not set anti-competitive or discriminatory conditions relating to access by third parties.

Registry services

Minds + Machines

Legal establishment

Corporation

Limited liability company

Gibraltar

Parent company:

Domain Venture Partners PCC Limited

Benefit

Mission/purpose:

Q18A
Mission and Purpose of .hotel?
The Applicant’s mission and purpose is to create an environment where individuals and companies can interact and express themselves in ways never before seen on the Internet, in a more targeted, secure and stable environment. Its aim is to become the premier online destination for such creators and their wide range of users. The Applicant will create an Internet space whose central function is to provide a platform for creating, producing and disseminating informative, creative and innovative content that is easily recognizable as pertaining to its stakeholder group. The Applicant is acutely aware of the importance of ICANN’s mission in coordinating the global Internetʹs systems of unique identifiers and ensuring their secure and stable operation. The Applicant’s core focus is to create a secure, sustainable, and specialized gTLD, thus supporting ICANN’s primary goals for this program in promoting consumer trust, consumer choice, competition and innovation.

Why .hotel?
Worldwide, people use hotels to, amongst other things, celebrate, relax and feel safe and comfortable. Everybody loves to escape to a hotel which best suits their needs, and indeed many enjoy the process of exploring the many possibilities out there. Certainly, the potential for this kind of research has greatly increased with the development of the internet.

However, access to the countless benefits and opportunities which the internet offers, such as finding the perfect hotel for your particular taste, can often be hindered when navigating the ever-expanding sea of irrelevant and sometimes malicious content which also exists.

Thus, the aim of .hotel is to create a blank canvas for the online hotel sector set within a secure environment. The Applicant will achieve this by creating a consolidated, versatile and dedicated space for the hotel sector. As the new space is dedicated to those within this affinity group the Applicant will ensure that consumer trust is promoted. Consequently consumer choice will be augmented as there will be a ready marketplace specifically for hotels and related enterprises to provide their goods and services. All stakeholders within the sector will be able to sample reactions to new ideas, or gather thoughts on the improvements of established ones. This will drive innovation and competition within the hotel sector as there will be new channels available not yet fulfilled by current market offerings. This new environment will cause registrants to seek new and varied ways to separate themselves from the competition.

How will .hotel take shape?
The Applicant believes that the success of the gTLD will be determined largely by the sector’s key global stakeholders. These stakeholders will be interested in registering a domain and additionally be motivated to protect their sector from detrimental practices. The Applicant believes that stakeholders should have the opportunity to influence the gTLD and the way it is governed. Accordingly, the Applicant is establishing a Governance Council (“GC”), consisting of key stakeholders that will serve as an advisory body.

Why Applicant?
The Applicant has substantial combined experience amongst its team in managing global businesses from a financial, legal and operational perspective and an exceptionally strong financial position. The Applicant’s Team has previous experience with the entire gTLD life-cycle significantly lowering any launch and ongoing operational risks associated with this application. The Applicant has engaged a world-class Registry services provider to manage the technical infrastructure of the .hotel gTLD. The Applicant is further advised by the leading sector experts in all other areas required to ensure a responsible and successful launch and ongoing management of the gTLD to the benefit of all stakeholders in the ICANN community.

Information for future studies and reviews
The Applicant recognizes the connection of the new gTLD application to the Affirmation of Commitments (“AoC”). To gauge the success of the new gTLD program, the Applicant recognizes that an AoC Review Team will be formed one year after the first delegation. To prepare for this, the ICANN Board resolved the creation of a Working Group to formulate definitions of competition, consumer trust and consumer choice and possible metrics for the future AoC team to consider in its gTLD review. The Applicant understands this effort has not been adopted by the ICANN Board, but many of the proposed metrics may be used to gauge the Applicant’s gTLD effectiveness and the gTLD program. The Applicant intends to track costs and benefit metrics to inform future studies and reviews. Proposed definitions are:
- Consumer Trust is defined as the confidence registrants and users have in the consistency of name resolution and the degree of confidence among registrants and users that a TLD Registry operator is fulfilling its proposed purpose and is complying with ICANN policies and applicable national laws.
- Consumer Choice is defined as the range of options available to registrants and users for domain scripts and languages, and for TLDs that offer choices as to the proposed purpose and integrity of their domain name registrants.
- Competition is defined as the quantity, diversity, and the potential for market rivalry of TLDs, TLD Registry operators, and Registrars.

Promoting Competition
Given the proposed definition for competition, the Applicant will attain this by contributing to the quantity and diversity within the Registry Operator space. The Applicant is a new entrant enhancing competition among the providers. The Applicant will promote competition for Registrants by amongst other things:
- Building a healthy growth trend of domain registrations
- Measure migration of content from other TLDs
- Maintain competitive pricing of domains

Promoting consumer trust
.hotel will be developed with consumer trust and satisfaction in mind. After 2 years of operations, the Applicant will conduct a survey to measure consumer trust and consumer satisfaction. This will be used to improve the service. The Applicant will among other things measure the following:
- Service Availability of Critical Registry Systems
- Abuse and Takedown incidents
- Rights protection incidents
- WHOIS data accuracy

Promoting consumer choice
The Applicant intends to promote consumer choice by achieving the following:
- Display of registration requirements and restrictions in the gTLD
- Highly available and geographically diverse Registrar channel
- Effective sunrise and trademark services

Domain names will be available globally, although the Applicant’s initial marketing efforts will be predominately directed to potential Registrants represented by the six (6) official languages of the United Nations (“UN Languages”), Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian and Spanish.
After the initial 2 years it is the Applicant’s aim that:
- Registrants globally should have access to Registrar services for the gTLD in at least the six UN Languages
- The gTLD is offered by Registrars covering at least 40 Countries and territories globally

Information on the effectiveness of safeguards
The Applicant takes rights protection and abuse prevention and mitigation very seriously and has developed policies accordingly. Amongst others, the Applicant will collect and evaluate data regarding:
- Effectiveness of the Sunrise process in limiting abusive registration practices
- Effectiveness of the additional Abuse Prevention and Mitigation (ʺAPMʺ)and Rights Protection Mechanisms (ʺRPMʺ)in limiting abusive registration practices
- Effectiveness of the mandatory APMs and RPMs
-end-

Geographic

Protections:

Introduction

The Applicant is aware of the substantial amount of work and effort that has gone into developing policy to address the issue of the reservation and release of geographic names under new gTLDs, including the valuable input from ICANNʹs Governmental Advisory Committee (ʺGACʺ), the Generic Names Supporting Organisation Reserved Names Working Group, Registry Operators and from elsewhere within the ICANN community.

The Applicant is aware of and understands the requirements set forth in the 11 January 2012 version of the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook (New gTLD Applicant Guidebook) and the GAC advice for protection of geographic names and will implement appropriate measures to ensure that it complies in all respects with ICANN policies and rules regarding both the reservation and release of geographic names at the second level (or other levels).

In addition to this, the Applicant proposes to implement an additional mechanism for the protection of capital city names at the second level that exceeds the requirements in the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook. See description of Capital City Claim service described below.

Reservation of Geographic Names

The initial GAC advice on the protection of geographic names is contained in the GAC document “Principles Regarding New gTLDs” which was presented by the GAC on 28 March 2007. Section 2.7(a) of this document states that new gTLD applicants should “adopt, before the new gTLD is introduced, appropriate procedures for blocking, at no cost and upon demand of governments, public authorities or IGOs, names with national or geographic significance at the second level of any new gTLD”.

Specification 5 of the New gTLD Registry Agreement provides further clarity and details the Schedule of Reserved Names at the Second Level (or other levels) in gTLD Registries, whereby the Registry Operator undertakes to reserve certain domain names and prevent them from being registered, delegated or used.

Section 2 of Specification 5 of the New gTLD Registry Agreement requires that all two character labels are initially reserved. This is to avoid conflicts and confusion with existing ccTLD extensions.

Section 5 of Specification 5 of the New gTLD Registry Agreement is more comprehensive and states that:

“5. Country and territory names contained in the following internationally recognized lists shall be initially reserved at the second level and at all other levels within the TLD at which the Registry Operator provides for registrations:

5.1. the short form (in English) of all country and territory names contained on the ISO 3166-1 list, as updated from time to time, including the European Union, which is exceptionally reserved on the ISO 3166-1 list, and its scope extended in August 1999 to any application needing to represent the name European Union 〈http:⁄⁄www.iso.org⁄iso⁄support⁄country_codes⁄iso_3166_code_lists⁄iso-3166-1_decoding_table.htm#EU〉;

5.2. the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, Technical Reference Manual for the Standardization of Geographical Names, Part III Names of Countries of the World; and

5.3. the list of United Nations member states in 6 official United Nations languages prepared by the Working Group on Country Names of the United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names”.

In order to meet these requirements regarding country and territory names, the applicant will maintain and regularly update copies of the aforementioned internationally recognized lists. All labels appearing on those lists, and on any list promulgated or recognized by ICANN for reservation in the future, assuming the corresponding string is unregistered, The Applicant will afford the same protections to new states or cities as they are formed.

The Applicant will reserve all labels appearing on the above referenced lists from time to time, and prevent registration, delegation or use of such names in accordance with ICANN requirements and as described above. In order to ensure that this is implemented correctly, all such labels will be reserved in the name of the applicant in order to prevent their delegation and use.

Release of Reserved Geographic Names

Specification 5 of the New gTLD Registry Agreement also contains provisions for the release of country and territory names on the basis that agreement is reached with “the applicable government(s), provided, further, that Registry Operator may also propose release of these reservations, subject to review by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and approval by ICANN”.

As such the applicantʹs proposed policy for the release of such reserved terms is cognisant of the review and approval process from the GAC and ICANN.

Based upon a review of the available literature, documentation and guidance, the applicant proposes the following policy to ICANN and the GAC for the potential release of reserved terms under the TLD:

i) Further to the successful evaluation and delegation of the TLD all of the aforementioned labels, as specified under Section 5 of Specification 5 of the New gTLD Registry Agreement will be reserved and thus unavailable for registration during each stage of the launch process including, but not limited to the Sunrise period, the Landrush period through to General registrations.

ii) At any stage during the launch process through to General registrations and beyond, the aforementioned reserved names may only be assigned to the relevant Government or public authority. In such situation they would be assigned using the following process:

a) The corresponding Government or public authority submits a request to the GAC seeking the assignment of the reserved name to themselves and provides the details of the proposed registrant entity for the domain name registration.

b) The GAC will validate it and authenticate the request to establish that is a genuine bona fide request.

c) Once this has been established by the GAC, the request for delegation will be forwarded to the applicant to request the assignment of the domain name. Simultaneously the GAC will also notify ICANN of the GAC approval of the request for the assignment of the domain name.

d) The applicant will issue a unique authorisation code to the proposed registrant entity.

e) The proposed registrant entity will then be able to request the assignment of the domain name to themselves using the authorisation code with an ICANN accredited registrar for the applicant TLD.

In addition to the above, the applicant will also adhere to and implement ICANN policy with regards to the reservation and release of such terms as and when required.

Additional Mechanism for Further Protection of Capital City Names
In parallel with the Landrush Period defined in the answer to question 18, the applicant will implement a Capital City Claim (“CCC”) service whereby additional protection will be granted to the capital city names of a country or territory listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard. The CCC process is described below:

a) Any prospective domain name registrant applying to register a domain name identical to the capital city name of a country or territory listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard will automatically receive from the Applicant a CCC notification highlighting the fact that the applied-for domain name corresponds to a capital city name of a country or territory listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard.

b) A potential domain name registrant receiving a CCC notification will have to send a response to the Applicant whereby it will unconditionally comply with the requirements as to representations and warranties required by the Applicant.

c) Unconditional acceptance of the representations and warranties set out in the CCC notification will be a material requirement for a prospective registrant to be eligible to register the domain name in question should said prospective registrant be successful in the Landrush period.

d) Upon registration during the Landrush period of a domain name identical to a capital city name of a country or territory listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard, the Applicant will send a notification listing the names in writing to the GAC Chair.
(see Q28 for more detail)
-end-

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Hotel

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