TLD Holding will introduce new domain suffixes for and on behalf of certain communities. Domains like www.ATLANTA.police or www.VISIT.tampa would become available by 2022/2023.

These are U.S.-based projects with U.S.-centric policy oversight; governed by U.S. legal entities, owned by representative target community stakeholders:

  • A suite of Government Function gTLDs (similar to .gov); highly restricted to Government-approved registrants:

    • ’.airport’ (e.g. www.LAX.airport - see www.dotAIRPORT.org - global deployment)

    • ’.police’ (e.g. www.ATLANTA.police - see www.dotPOLICE.org - U.S.-centric; but globally available)

    • ‘.county’ (e.g. www.HARRIS.county - see www.dotCOUNTY.org - only for the 3,142 U.S. counties)

  • A suite of max five U.S. city gTLDs (all restricted to entities in the relevant community):

    • ‘.orlando’ (e.g. www.DISNEY.orlando - see www.dotORLANDO.org)

    • ‘.tampa’ & ‘.stpete’ (e.g. www.VISIT.tampa - see www.dotTAMPA.org & www.dotSTPETE.org; Tampa Bay Area)

    • ‘.denver’ (e.g. www.RealEstate.denver - see www.dotDENVER.org)

    • ‘.chicago’ (e.g. www.DENTIST.chicago - see www.dotCHICAGO.org)

 

These are public interest, non-profit, target community owned, funded & governed projects. The main objective is increasing impact and usefulness for the Internet user while providing excellent naming opportunities for the relevant, prospective domain registrants:

  • airports, police departments, counties

For city gTLDs:

  • businesses, organizations and the local Government of the relevant cities.

The city gTLDs aim at keeping business in the city by promoting “buy local” and local businesses; this in part by ensuring that the most impacting generic term domains like apartments.tampa, books.tampa or tires.tampa stay with relevant local businesses and aren’t simply affiliate websites for national outlets or services. Local chambers and business associations will aid to keep these domains within the relevant respective business area.

There is no focus on “traditional” domain registry measures like maximization of domain count (number of domains registered) or return of investment (revenues). The business model of these registries is also very non-traditional:
In the past most domain registries acquired venture capital to apply for a new gTLD - then they tried to recover these investments and the management costs through registration fees with the aim to maximize profit; with little to no focus on namespace management, community outreach, gTLD branding, creation of brand awareness among the target community (if such community even existed).
The proposed gTLDs by TLD Holding will require investment as well, but as the registries are public interest, non-profits they do not align with the requirements of traditional Venture Capital. Instead they are seeking “Impact Investments” and will orient domain pricing in a way that covers the overall cost (return of investment, operation &management cost). Especially the pricing model for the Government suite gTLDs will reflect the size of the registrant entity: Airports for example by number of Million Passengers per year. Counties or police departments by number of citizens served. The smallest community members (community airports, very small counties or police departments) will likely pay no fee at all. Whereas with increasing size the largest entities (ATL, LAX, NYPD, LAPD, etc) will have to cover a proportional portion of the cost.

Most importantly initially all relevant domain names will be registered by the respective registry and already routed to the relevant existing websites at no cost: All U.S. cities, U.S. counties, U.S. airport or U.S. PD names for example (lax.airport, denver.airport, harris.county, detroit.police). All City Government functions as well: gas.tampa, reycling.tampa, electricity.tampa, mayor.tampa, etc. These will be in some cases tens of thousands domain names per registry. We are not waiting that members of the target communities register and route domain names: we do it for them. Thus the Internet user will be able to make use of these new domain names independently of whether the prospective registrants claim “their” domains, or not. These are “instant domains” - a city could start using “www.solidwaste.tampa” (currently: www.tampagov.net/solidwaste) already on their waste trucks - without even taking ownership. This is a “first” in the domain name system.

TLD Holding doesn’t retain ownership but acts as a holding company for the for-profit management entities that will manage the processes around each application for the different non-profits:

  • Community outreach

  • Funding acquisition within the target community

  • Business and operations plan creation

  • Policy development

  • Application crafting and submission (each application at ICANN requires a several hundred page long application)

  • gTLD launch once it is granted by ICANN

  • Rollout of the different launch phases with a focus on keeping impacting domains within the relevant target group within each target community

  • Ongoing maintenance of the gTLDs