.lds Domain

The .LDS TLD will be established to serve the needs of the global community ("Community") comprising members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Church"). This mission is tightly connected with the definition of the community, policies governing registration eligibility and content/use restrictions applicable to the proposed gTLD, and their enforcement.

The applied-for gTLD "LDS" is an acronym for "Latter-day Saints," a familiar tag describing the Community and the Church members that compose it. The phrase "LDS community" refers to the members of the Church collectively. The Community is truly global—it consists of approximately 14.1 million members of the Church living in nearly 170 countries and on every continent—and it has unique needs that the applied-for gTLD will serve.

Eligibility to register domain names under the .LDS gTLD will be highly restricted. Only the Applicant and its designated representative, Church officers and employees, and organizations affiliated with the Church will have authority to register names. Restricting eligibility in this manner is intended to advance the mission of the gTLD as a means of serving the Community.

Community members have distinct needs to receive accurate information about the Church, its beliefs and activities from Church leaders and officers. To meet those needs, the proposed gTLD will provide authentic and authoritative content from the Church and its leaders. Obtaining that information from a trusted online source is indispensable to Community members for their personal and family religious worship and for their ecclesiastical worship and activities.

Content and use rules are intended to preserve the community focus of the .LDS gTLD. Acceptable domain names will denote geographic units of the Church, such as areas, missions, and temple districts; general Church organizations such as Sunday School and Relief Society; and affiliated organizations such as LDS Humanitarian Services.

Policies governing registration eligibility and content and use will be enforced by requiring review of any proposed domain name by the Applicant's manager and by outside counsel. Enforcement policies will be intended to ensure that the online content provided under the .LDS gTLD will be delivered with the authenticity that the Community needs.
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i. Areas of specialty, reputation, service levels.

The .LDS gTLD will aim to provide benefits for Internet users in areas of specialty and reputation and, to a lesser extent, in service levels.

The .LDS gTLD and its companion applied-for gTLD .MORMON will be the only two gTLDs on the Internet dedicated exclusively to the distinctive needs and interests of the Church, Church members, and others interested in receiving accurate information about the Church, its beliefs and activities. Areas of specialty will naturally flow from this exclusive focus by the registry operator. Such areas may include, but are not limited to: live webcasts of General Conference (a semi-annual gathering of Community members from around the world); online publication of Church magazines, manuals, guides, handbooks, and other official publications; official news and information about the Church and its activities; current direction and instructions to Community members from Church leaders; and a communications platform for Church leaders and employees to communicate with each other, for the purpose of carrying out the mission and operations of the Church.

The .LDS gTLD will seek to build on the Church's global reputation by striving for the highest standards in online communications. A current website operated by the Church, MORMON.org, was recognized in 2011 by Interactive Media Awards as one of the Internet's Top Ten Websites. The Applicant anticipates that the same high standards will characterize the operation of the .LDS gTLD and any content offered there.

Service levels do not carry the same importance for the .LDS gTLD as they would for gTLDs operated for profit. As explained more fully in the Intended Registration Policies described below, only the Applicant or its designated party will be eligible to register names under the proposed gTLD. For that reason, no third-party registrant will be affected by service levels under the proposed gTLD.

With respect to Internet users, the Applicant is committed to provide continuous, high-quality service for users who access any content offered in websites under the proposed gTLD. It has engaged the backend registry services of Afilias Ltd. and the data escrow services of NCC Group, Inc., world leaders in providing these services. The Applicant's contracts with them, the terms of which amply satisfy the technical requirements of operating a gTLD (as described in answers to questions 23-44), also establish the continuity of service and high quality technical facilities necessary to serve the Community in keeping with the mission of the .LDS gTLD. User feedback will be invited at a designated email address, reviewed regularly, and considered when making changes and improvements to online content and services.

ii. Adding to the Current Space.

It is anticipated that the proposed .LDS gTLD will add to the current TLD space in terms of differentiation by creating an area in the root zone essentially designated for the distinct needs and interests of the Community. Those needs and interests include, but are not limited to: obtaining authentic and authoritative information from Church leaders and officers; obtaining Church materials to assist in carrying out Church responsibilities; locating Church congregations, local leaders, and nearby temples; researching family history; and learning about current activities of the Church, including its humanitarian efforts, educational programs, and missionary programs.

The proposed .LDS gTLD is intended to advance the mission of the Church and not to affect market competition in the TLD industry.

Innovation in online services certainly appears to be possible, given the technical platform that management of a new gTLD will provide. The Applicant will carefully study such techniques as they become available or apparent following delegation of the proposed gTLD into the root and consider deploying them to improve its service to the Community. But it has no specific innovations that it anticipates deploying at this time.

iii. User experience.

The .LDS gTLD will aim to provide a unique user experience for members of the Community. That experience will be characterized by the principles of authenticity and accessibility.

The proposed gTLD will provide authentic and authoritative content from the Church and its leaders. Such leadership is central to the religious beliefs and institutional structure of the Community. Church members are organized with a central leadership (as the answer to Question 20 describes more fully). They rely on the leadership and direction of general officers of the Church for religious instruction, personal direction, and administrative instructions in carrying out their personal and ecclesiastical responsibilities. Obtaining that information from a trusted online source is indispensable to Community members for their personal and family religious worship and for their ecclesiastical worship and activities. Operation of the proposed gTLD offers the Church an opportunity to ensure that the online content it provides will be delivered with the authenticity that the Community needs.

Content provided under the proposed gTLD must be accessible to be effective. To that end, the Applicant is enlisting the technical assistance of world-class partners—Afilias and NCC Group—to ensure that robust technical facilities and services are in place to offer access with minimal downtime or technical faults. Also, the Church already offers many of its webcasts and written materials in multiple languages, to serve the needs of its global Community. (For instance, October 2011 General Conference was made available online with simultaneous translations and recordings in 80 languages besides English.) The Applicant anticipates that content offered under the proposed gTLD would continue this established pattern.

iv. Intended Registration Policies.

a. Eligibility

Eligibility to register domain names under the .LDS gTLD will be highly restricted. Only the Applicant and its designated representative, Church officers and employees, and organizations affiliated with the Church will have authority to register names. Restricting eligibility in this manner is justified because the mission of the proposed gTLD is to serve the Community, not to recover revenues through the sale of domains, and because permitting third-party registrants could confuse Community members about the authenticity of content on the gTLD, contrary to that mission.

The Applicant has developed a list of acceptable domains. These include geographic units of the Church such as "area," "mission," "temple district," and "stake." They also include general Church organizations such as "Sunday School" and "Relief Society," as well as matters of general interest to the Community such as "Church music" and "General Conference." Acceptable domain names also include affiliated organizations such as "LDS Humanitarian Services."

A list of Reserved Names has also been developed, composed of domain names that the Applicant will not resolve under the .LDS gTLD. This list includes inappropriate terms such as "money" and "politics." Rank-and-file Church members will not be granted domain names, in order to preserve the use of the .LDS gTLD for the general needs of the Community.

New domain names will be added through an internal process that has been established. Domain names may be proposed by any party eligible to register names. The proposed name will be forwarded to the Applicant's manager and its outside counsel, Kirton McConkie. Registration requests will be decided by the manager in consultation with outside counsel. Disputes concerning eligibility will also be decided by the manager in consultation with outside counsel.

b. Name Selection

• Domain names under the .LDS gTLD will be at least 3 characters and no more than 63 characters long.
• Domain names will consist only of letters, numbers, and hyphens and will start and end with an alphanumeric character but not a hyphen.

Applicant will reserve from registration all names contained in Specification 5 of the New gTLD Agreement, "Schedule of Reserved Names at the Second Level in gTLD Registries." This includes reservation of:

• The label "EXAMPLE";
• Two-character labels, unless released pursuant to an agreement with the relevant government and country-code manager;
• Tagged domain names, defined as domain names with hyphens in the third and fourth positions;
• Names for registry operations, including NIC, WWW, IRIS, and WHOIS;
• Country names and territory names, except pursuant to an agreement with the relevant government or subject to the review by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee ("GAC") and approval by the ICANN Board of Directors.

Any party eligible to register domains under the .LDS gTLD will be allowed to register any second-level domain in the format of "anyname.lds," subject to the restrictions described above and the legal rights protections required by Specification 7 of the New gTLD Agreement.

c. Content/use

Domains registered under the .LDS gTLD will be used in conformity with the stated mission of the proposed gTLD. This means that domain names will be used to serve the needs and interests of the Community, as determined by the Applicant's manager in consultation with outside counsel.

d. Enforcement

Internal policies and procedures prevent any domain name from being added to the .LDS registry without the approval of the Applicant's manager. Every request for a domain name will be decided by him, in consultation with the Applicant's outside counsel, Kirton McConkie. Their review will be intended to maintain compliance with Registration Policies and to retain consistency between the actual operations of the registry and its community-oriented mission. Outside counsel will maintain the list of Reserved Names. Any internal challenges to a proposed domain name registration will be decided by the Applicant's manager following a recommendation by outside counsel.

Because the .LDS gTLD is restricted to the Applicant and related entities, no enforcement issues with respect to third parties will arise and appeal mechanisms applicable to such issues are unnecessary.

v. Protecting Confidential Information.

The .LDS gTLD will impose measures for protecting the privacy or confidential information of Internet users. Measures to protect registrant information are unnecessary because there will be no third-party registrants eligible to register names under the .LDS TLD.

The Applicant will impose measures generally in keeping with guidelines adopted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ("OECD"). Such measures include:

Collection limitation. Personal data consisting of name, street address, e-mail address, and telephone number may be collected voluntarily from Internet users for restricted purposes described below.

Data quality. Personal data that may be collected will be relevant (in fact, necessary) to the purposes for which they are to be used. Their accuracy, completeness, and currency will depend on the person submitting the data. No independent validation will be performed.

Specified purposes. The Applicant will post a Privacy Policy on the domains it launches under the proposed TLD that will describe the purposes for collecting the personal data. Use of that data will be limited to the fulfillment of those purposes, as stated.

Use limitation. Personal data will not be disclosed except for the purposes stated in the Applicant's Privacy Policy, except with the user's consent or by authority of law.

Security safeguards. Personal data will be protected by reasonable security safeguards against loss, unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure. Such safeguards will be commercially reasonable and may include access control lists, identification and authentication protocols, and protection of information at rest.

Openness. The Applicant will follow a general policy of openness about developments, practices, and policies with respect to personal data. A full Privacy Policy posted on domains under the proposed TLD will inform users of the existence and nature of personal data, the purposes for its collection and use, and the contact information for the Data Privacy Officer.

Individual Participation. An individual user will have opportunities to (a) inquire from the Data Privacy Officer whether the Applicant has data relating to him; (b) receive such data within a reasonable time at a reasonable charge; (c) challenge data relating to him and, if the challenge is successful, to have the data erased, rectified, completed, or amended.

Accountability. The data privacy officer will be accountable to the Applicant and its corporate parent for complying with the measures described above.

Outreach and Communications. The Applicant anticipates using the Church's established channels of communication and outreach to help achieve the benefits projected above. The Church may rely on its Public Affairs Department, access to print and broadcast media, its own publications, web site announcements and email notifications, and direct communications between general Church officers and local Church leaders and congregations. These resources permit the Church to deliver its messages to target audiences effectively. General announcements regarding the launch of the proposed TLD may be made using a combination of these resources, and further announcements may be made as content in various categories comes online.

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Multiple applications. No operating rules will be necessary to address the problem of multiple applications for a particular domain name. Third-party registrants will not be eligible to register names under this gTLD, and any duplicative or conflicting requests for a particular domain name will be resolved through the correlation of different departments and offices within the Church.

Cost benefits and price escalation. Both questions presuppose the sale of domain names to registrants. Because no third-party registrants will be eligible to register names under the proposed gTLD, neither cost benefits nor price escalation are relevant considerations.



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SUMMARY The .LDS gTLD will be established to serve the needs and interests of the global community ("Community") comprising members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Church"). Delineation. Formal membership in the Church is the means by which the Community is delineated from Internet users generally. Organization. The Community is centrally organized, starting with local congregations and running to general Church officers that conduct the affairs of the entire Church. The Church's highest governing body is the First Presidency, the organization that has endorsed this application. Date of establishment. The Community was formally organized with the incorporation of the Church on April 6, 1830. Community activities. This application highlights a few of the Community's many activities in the areas of education, family history, and humanitarian services. For instance, between 1985 and 2009 Church humanitarian efforts provided more than $1.2 billion in total assistance to needy persons in 178 countries and territories. Size and geographic extent. As of 2010, there were approximately 14.1 members of the Church living in nearly 170 countries and on every continent. DETAILED RESPONSES Community delineation. Membership in the Church is the means by which this community is delineated from Internet users generally. Church membership is established by formal baptism and supported by a personal commitment to live Church principles throughout one's life. Observance of principles such as abstinence from alcohol, coffee, and tea; donating one-tenth of one's income to the Church as tithing; and adhering to a strict code of sexual morality—all these are distinguishing commitments of Church members. Membership is available only through baptism, which must be authorized by a local priesthood leader and properly recorded by a local clerk. Church records are maintained, updated, and transferred only by Church clerks authorized to do so. Records can be removed only following the disciplinary decision of local Church leaders or by request of an individual Church member. Community structure and organization. The Church traces its organizational structure to the New Testament and modern revelation. It is led by the President of the Church and his counselors, who together function as the First Presidency, the highest governing body of the Church. Twelve Apostles form the Quorum of the Twelve, the second-highest governing body of the Church. Together the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve lead the entire Church. A local congregation of Church members is called a "ward" or (if smaller) a "branch" and is led by a "bishop" or "branch president." A group of wards forms a "stake" and a group of branches a "district." The leader of a stake with multiple wards is a "stake president" and the leader of a district with multiple branches is a "district president." Stake presidents, district presidents, bishops, and branch presidents are the leaders most often encountered by Church members. They serve without monetary compensation. Auxiliary organizations serve the needs of particular groups of Church members. The Primary Organization serves children from 18 months to 12 years old. The Young Women's Program serves girls from 12 to 18 years old. The Young Men's Program serves boys from 12 to 18 years old, and in North America the Church also sponsors participation in the Boy Scouts of America for boys from 11 to 18 years old. Women are served by the Relief Society. Founded in 1842, it is one of the oldest and largest women's organizations in the world with more than 6 million members in nearly 170 countries. Men serve as members of a lay priesthood that is organized by age and office into quorums of deacons, teachers, priests, elders, and high priests. Date of Establishment. The Church whose members the Community comprises was established on April 6, 1830. Community activities. During its nearly two centuries of existence the Church has organized and participated in too many activities to be described here. Current Church-wide activities that illustrate its global interests and commitments include humanitarian services, education, and family history. Humanitarian services are provided by the Church to people in need around the world, without regard to their nationality or religion. Such services may include emergency response to natural disasters. Its response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake exemplifies the type and scope of aid that the Church delivers to the victims of natural disasters. Latter-day Saint Charities sent over 1,000,000 pounds (25 semi-trucks) of food, hygiene kits, water filtration bottles, water systems, and medical supplies such as medicine and wheelchairs. Twenty-seven hundred tents were distributed to families forced to leave their homes. Additional shelters were made available by opening up 9 LDS chapels located in and around Port-au-Prince. Food and other relief supplies brought into Haiti were used at these shelters to assist with basic needs. Approximately half of the people that were helped at or in Church facilities were members of other faiths. The Church also sent medical teams to Haiti, tending to the wounded by performing surgeries, setting broken bones, and providing other medical attention. Mental health professionals also were sent to address pressing mental health issues resulting from the disaster. Similar assistance was delivered by the Church to the victims of last year's earthquakes in Japan, the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, and dozens of other natural disasters around the world. The Church recognizes that charitable services also need to be directed at more entrenched and long-term needs. To that end, it sponsors ongoing global projects in neonatal resuscitation training, clean water projects, wheelchair distribution, vision treatment, and measles vaccinations. Overall, from 1985 to 2009, the Church's Humanitarian Services programs provided more than $1.2 billion in total assistance to needy individuals in 178 countries and territories. Every dollar donated to the Church's humanitarian services is used for relief efforts directly. The Church absorbs its own overhead costs. Education. The Church operates the third-largest private university in the United States—Brigham Young University—as well as Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Brigham Young University-Idaho, and LDS Business College. The Church Educational System provides religious instruction in seminaries for high school students and institutes for university students. Since March 2001 the Church has operated a Perpetual Education Fund that offers Church members outside the United States education and training to become better employed in their own countries. The Fund offers loans at minimum interest for selected students to pay for tuition and books. After the schooling is completed the loan is repaid over an eight-year period and the repayments are reinvested into the Fund. Church members donate additional money to assist the Fund. In the decade since its inception the Fund has assisted 46,000 students in 45 countries. Family history work has been important to the Church from earliest days. The Church's Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah is the largest genealogy library in the world. It offers public access to collections consisting of more than two billion records of deceased people. Over 700 staff and volunteers assist the public with their family history work, and over 1,900 people visit the library each day. Community size. As of 2010, there were approximately 14.1 million members of the Church living in nearly 170 countries and on every continent.×

The Applicant is a subsidiary of Intellectual Reserve, Inc., a wholly owned corporation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the organization by which the Community in Question 20(a) is identified. The Applicant serves as the legal entity through which gTLD applications are submitted and (if successful) gTLDs will be managed on behalf of the Church for the benefit of the Community. The Applicant is directly accountable to general Church officers, who in turn are accountable to Church members through semi-annual worldwide General Conferences, where they are invited to express publicly their continuing support for that leadership.×

This proposed gTLD serves the purpose of uniting the global community of all members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Intended registrants include the Applicant, its designated representative, Church officers and employees, and organizations affiliated with the Church. Intended end-users include members of the Church, as well as non-members looking for information about the Church, its beliefs and activities. Related activities that the Applicant intends to carry out in service of this purpose include webcasting General Conference. Held twice each year, General Conference offers Church members an opportunity to hear from Church leaders and officers directly. Five sessions of two hours each are conducted over two days in April and again in October. Thousands of Community members and others attend live sessions in the Church's Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. Millions more access Conference online. Simultaneous translation is made available in 80 non-English languages, for the benefit of Community members worldwide, and videos of the sessions are recorded and available online in these languages so that members who cannot watch the webcasts live can view them at a more convenient time. The stated community purpose—uniting Church members—is of an undoubtedly lasting nature. Members comprise a worldwide community of more than 14 million people, divided by language and geography, but united by common religious convictions. Since April 6, 1830, the Church has been established under its current name and with essentially the same organizational structure. From its beginnings in New York, the Church moved as a body to Ohio and Missouri and Illinois before an epic westward migration took the Church to Utah in 1847. Since then it has grown beyond its origins as an American church: more members now live outside the United States than in it. Yet the Church has maintained a centralized organization. This explains why direct control of the .LDS gTLD will be expected by members of the Community. Any other outcome would be inconsistent with its history and fundamental commitments. The Community itself is emphatically of "a lasting, non-transient nature." Its activities stretch back over two centuries and its investments of time, money, and resources into forward-looking projects such as humanitarian aid and education bespeak a deep institutional commitment to the future.×

Relationship to the Community's Established Name The applied-for gTLD string "LDS" matches the name of the Community. Since 1830 the Church has been organized under its current name, which includes the phrase "Latter-day Saints." The significance of this phrase to identify the Community is highlighted by Church officials who continue to counsel members and instruct journalists to use the full name of the Church, including that phrase. Relationship to the Identification of Community Members The acronym "LDS" clearly identifies members of the Community. Church members refer to themselves collectively by the acronym "LDS." Journalists and media outlets also use this acronym to refer to Community members. Connotations of the String Beyond the Community The Applicant is aware of a few connotations that the proposed string has beyond the Community, but none of these alternate uses of the acronym "LDS" is as widely accepted as its use to describe members of the Community. The applied-for TLD "LDS" was compared with other strings using the String Similarity Assessment Tool and produced a Similarity Score of 57. Three strings produced scores of 57, 55, and 55: "ls," "sd," and "sl." Each of these two-character ccTLDs bears some linguistic similarity to "LDS," in that they take two out of three characters from the applied-for TLD. But none takes the same characters in the same order, and none is a three-character string. Based on this analysis, we conclude that the applied-for TLD "LDS" bears only a superficial similarity to other strings based on the SWORD score. A search on Wikipedia reveals that the acronym "LDS" also describes the Leeds railway station in England, a British dental degree, a district in the German State of Brandenburg, and a Slovenian political party. All these uses are local, however, while the use of the acronym "LDS" to describe Church members is both global in scope and of a longer historical duration.×

iv. Intended Registration Policies. a. Eligibility Eligibility to register domain names under the .LDS gTLD will be highly restricted. Only the Applicant and its designated representative, Church officers and employees, and organizations affiliated with the Church will have authority to register names. Restricting eligibility in this manner is justified because the mission of the proposed gTLD is to serve the Community, not to recover revenues through the sale of domains, and because permitting third-party registrants could confuse Community members about the authenticity of content on the gTLD, contrary to that mission. The Applicant has developed a list of acceptable domains. These include geographic units of the Church such as "area," "mission," "temple district," and "stake." They also include general Church organizations such as "Sunday School" and "Relief Society," as well as matters of general interest to the Community such as "Church music" and "General Conference." Acceptable domain names also include affiliated organizations such as "LDS Humanitarian Services." A list of Reserved Names has also been developed, composed of domain names that the Applicant will not resolve under the .LDS gTLD. This list includes inappropriate terms such as "money" and "politics." Individual Church members will not be granted domain names, in order to preserve the use of the .LDS gTLD for the general needs of the Community. New domain names will be added through an internal process that has been established. Domain names may be proposed by any party eligible to register names. The proposed name will be forwarded to the Applicant's manager and its outside counsel, Kirton McConkie. Registration requests will be decided by the manager in consultation with outside counsel. Disputes concerning eligibility will also be decided by the manager in consultation with outside counsel. b. Name Selection • Domain names under the .LDS TLD will be at least 3 characters and no more than 63 characters long. • Domain names will consist only of letters, numbers, and hyphens and will start and end with an alphanumeric character but not a hyphen. Applicant will reserve from registration all names contained in Specification 5 of the New gTLD Agreement, "Schedule of Reserved Names at the Second Level in gTLD Registries." This includes reservation of: • The label "EXAMPLE"; • Two-character labels, unless released pursuant to an agreement with the relevant government and country-code manager; • Tagged domain names, defined as domain names with hyphens in the third and fourth position; • Names for registry operations, including NIC, WWW, IRIS, and WHOIS; • Country names and territory names, except pursuant to an agreement with the relevant government or subject to the review by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee and approval by the ICANN Board of Directors. Any party eligible to register domains under the .LDS gTLD will be allowed to register any second-level domain in the format of "anyname.lds," subject to the restrictions described above and the legal rights protections required by Specification 7 of the New gTLD Agreement. c. Content/use Domains registered under the .LDS gTLD Registered domain names will be used in conformity with the stated mission of the proposed gTLD. This means that domain names will be used to serve the needs of Community members, as determined by the Applicant's manager in consultation with outside counsel. d. Enforcement Internal policies and procedures prevent any domain name from being added to the .LDS registry without the approval of the Applicant's manager. Every request for a domain name will be decided by the manager, in consultation with the Applicant's outside counsel, Kirton McConkie. Their review will be intended to maintain compliance with Registration Policies and to retain a close nexus between the actual operations of the registry and its community-oriented mission. Outside counsel will maintain the list of Reserved Names. Any internal challenges to a proposed domain name registration will be decided by the Applicant's manager following a recommendation by outside counsel. Because the .LDS TLD is restricted to the Applicant and related entities, no enforcement issues with respect to third parties will arise and appeal mechanisms applicable to such issues are unnecessary.×

We will protect names with national or geographic significance by reserving the country and territory names at the second level and at all other levels within the gTLD, as per the requirements in the New gTLD Registry Agreement (Specification 5, paragraph 5).
We will employ a series of rules to translate the geographical names required to be reserved by Specification 5, paragraph 5 to a form consistent with the ʺhost namesʺ format used in domain names.

Considering the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) advice "Principles regarding new gTLDs", these domains will be blocked, at no cost to governments, public authorities, or IGOs, before the TLD is introduced (Sunrise), so that no parties may apply for them. We will publish a list of these names before Sunrise, so our registrars and their prospective applicants can be aware that these names are reserved.

We will define a procedure so that governments can request the above reserved domain(s) if they would like to take possession of them. This procedure will be based on existing methodology developed for the release of country names in the .INFO TLD. For example, we will require a written request from the country's GAC representative, or a written request from the country's relevant Ministry or Department. We will allow the designated beneficiary (the Registrant) to register the name, with an accredited Afilias Registrar, possibly using an authorization number transmitted directly to the designated beneficiary in the country concerned.

As defined by Specification 5, paragraph 5, such geographic domains may be released to the extent that Registry Operator reaches agreement with the applicable government(s). Registry operator will work with respective GAC representatives of the country's relevant Ministry of Department to obtain their release of the names to the Registry Operator.

If internationalized domain names (IDNs) are introduced in the TLD in the future, we will also reserve the IDN versions of the country names in the relevant script(s) before IDNs become available to the public. If we find it advisable and practical, we will confer with relevant language authorities so that we can reserve the IDN domains properly along with their variants.

Regarding GAC advice regarding second-level domains not specified via Specification 5, paragraph 5: All domains awarded to registrants are subject to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), and to any properly-situated court proceeding. We will ensure appropriate procedures to allow governments, public authorities or IGOs to challenge abuses of names with national or geographic significance at the second level. In its registry-registrar agreement, and flowing down to registrar-registrant agreements, the registry operator will institute a provision to suspend domains names in the event of a dispute. We may exercise that right in the case of a dispute over a geographic name.

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