.legal Pre-Register Domain - .legal Domain Information

Mission/Purpose

.LEGAL will provide legal professionals; legal firms and any person or institution related to the legal profession worldwide the possibility of establishing their internet presence in a differentiated and exclusive manner.

.LEGAL is intended to be a truly global extension as this string has the same meaning in Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, and French. This makes up to around 1 billion people worldwide who will natively understand the extension and its relationship to the legal profession and the legal world in general.

According to an independent research made by the applicant, there are around 190,000 domain names that contain the word LEGAL. Of these, around 26,000 end with the word legal. This means that all these people might find in a .LEGAL domain a great way to establish their online presence. Our goal is to be the choice of around 45,000 websites after three years of peration.

Benefit to registrants: The .LEGAL extension will benefit registrants related to the Legal World by being a choice to establish their internet presence with differentiated and exclusive name.

Benefit to Internet users: Internet users will benefit from the extension because they will have a clear indication of the content held/hosted on sites with domain names under the .LEGAL termination.

Benefit to the market as a whole: Right now, more than one half of the domain names in the world are under two extensions, both operated by the same company. The Internet as a whole needs to encourage and promote competition in a way that market rules apply to the domain extension market. The existence of .LEGAL may be part of this process of enhancing competition. This in the long run benefits all the Internet consumers as products have to compete by offering better specifications and consumer services. Furthermore, being a company from Latin America, the extension will help strengthen ICANN´s mission to promote a really global independent Internet.

Specialty: The extension will specialize in providing names to sites for individuals and companies worldwide related to Legal professions and or activities.

Service Levels: Regarding service levels, this issue may be split into three sections that imply the Registry directly:

Technical service level at the Registry level regarding the availability of DNS for the domains under the .LEGAL extension: This subject will be discussed in the technical section. Basically, we have contracted with a specialized Registry services provider whose expertise and technical background guarantee the highest availability and stability of the DNS services for the domains under the .LEGAL extension.

Technical service level at the Registry level regarding the availability of the registration interface to the Registrars: As with the previous question, this will be discussed in the technical section. Availability of the interface to Registrars will rely on our technical services provider.

Support service level at the Registry level to act upon support requests made by Registrars: As has been agreed with our technical services provider, support to Registrars will be provided by a qualified and competent team via phone and email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Reputation: We will strive on achieving a reputation of a responsible stable space as required by the audience we are trying to serve.

Regarding user experience, at a registrar level the .LEGAL TLD will be registered using the existing distribution channels. We will have an outstanding support for our registrars and will consistently promote user adoption.

The achievement of the goals stated above requires that we do not incorporate a complex policy framework. We need to manage policy in a way that makes user adoption easy and straightforward. The .LEGAL Registry will be an open space in which one of our main goals is to facilitate as much as possible the registration of domain names. Below is a draft on the policy on domain registrations under the .LEGAL extension.

Policy draft

Introduction: The policy below is an initial approach to the policies that will rule over .LEGAL domain registrations. The policy includes:

- Gradual Offering Plan
- Geographic String Protection (Details addressed in question 22)
- General policy considerations
- General Availability policies

Gradual Offering plan:

The Gradual Offering Plan seeks to fairly distribute domain names to registrants, protecting intellectual and industrial property, and assigning second level .LEGAL domains in a fair and orderly manner. The Gradual Offering Plan ends when the domains are finally available for public registration.

Objectives:

There are two main objectives sought with the Gradual Offering Plan. 1) to protect trademark rights and intellectual/industrial property to prevent/avoid abuse and bad faith in domain registrations. 2) To allow a phase of registration where domains are not registered in a first come, first serve basis for special commercial and other interests.

Structure: The plan is divided into two phases. The Sunrise phase and the Landrush phase. Both phases will be detailed next.

Sunrise: The Sunrise phase will allow companies with Trademarks to apply for the domains at the second level that match the protected strings according to the Trademark record.

Timeframe:

The Sunrise phase will begin 90 days after the execution of the Registry Agreement with ICANN and will last for 45 days. Both opening and closing of the phase will be done at 00:00:00 UTC.

Applicable strings (Strings that may be delegated in the second level in this phase):

Only trademarks registered before the 31st of December of 2011, and in full force at the time of the request may apply for the Sunrise phase.

- The exact equivalent of a textual trademark.
- The exact textual portion of a trademark that has textual portion and an image.

Explanatory textual terms about the trademark or the trademark registration: LLC, LTD, S.A., TM, INC, etc. may be removed from the requested domain, if and only if the text is for explanation purposes.

In the case of URLs, TLDS may be removed from the domain requested like .COM, .NET. ORG, .CO, etc. WWW may also be removed from the requested domain.

Characters like spaces and: . , ! : ? ! " # $ % & / ( ) - _ etc. may be transcribed (f.e. & for AND or Y) removed from the requested domain.

If the trademark includes letters like "á", "é", "í", "ó", "ú", "ü" "ñ", these may be replaced for corresponding letters like "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", or "n", or the conventionally accepted characters.

No other changes may be made to the domains requested.

Contention:

If two requests are received for the same domain, these requests will go to auction. Auctions will be conducted as detailed later. Every valid request on the Sunrise phase will be temporarily reserved by the Registry until the outcome of the registration is defined.

Special Considerations

- All Sunrise requests must be done through ICANN Accredited Registrars.
- Proxy Registrations may not be used in the Sunrise phase. Registrations may change their records to Proxy records after the extension is released to General Availability.
- Both Trademarks that are registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse, and Trademarks that are not registered in the Clearinghouse may apply for the phase.
- The Registry may reject, delete, revoke, suspend, cancel or transfer a domain according to the rules of the Registry-Registrar Agreement that will stand between the Registry and all the Accredited Registrars for any domain registration to be submitted and maintained.
- Sunrise registrations may only be done for 1 year. Subsequently after General Availability applicants may renew the domain as allowed by this policies.

Landrush: The Landrush phase will allow applicants with commercial or specific interest to apply for a domain name. This also includes trademark holders that for some reason may have not applied for the Sunrise phase.

Timeframe:

The Landrush phase will begin 20 days after the end of the Sunrise phase and will last for 45 days. Both opening and closing of the phase will be done at 00:00:00 UTC.

Any valid domain that has not been reserved or requested in the Sunrise phase may be requested in the Landrush phase.

Contention:

If two requests are received for the same domain, these requests will go to auction. Auctions will be conducted as detailed later. Every valid request on the Landrush phase will be temporarily reserved by the Registry until the outcome of the registration is defined.

Special Considerations

- All Landrush requests must be done through ICANN Accredited Registrars.
- Proxy Registrations may not be used in the Landrush phase. Registrations may change their records to Proxy records after the extension is released to General Availability.
- The Registry may reject, delete, revoke, suspend, cancel or transfer a domain according to the rules of the Registry-Registrar Agreement that will stand between the Registry and all the Accredited Registrars for any domain registration to be submitted and maintained.
- Landrush registrations may only be done for 1 year. Subsequently after General Availability applicants may renew the domain as allowed by these policies.

General Availability policies

General Availability will allow registrants to register a domain name on a first come first serve basis. This phase will be the regular operation of the registrations under the extension.

Timeframe:

The General Availability phase will begin 20 days after the end of the Landrush phase and will be indefinite. Opening of General Availability phase will be done at 00:00:00 UTC.

Any valid domain that has not been reserved or requested in the Sunrise, Landrush or GPP phase may be requested in General Availability.

Trademark claims service:

Registry will implement the Trademark Claims service as detailed and instructed by ICANN for the first 60 days of operation of the Registry.

Special Considerations

- All requests must be done through ICANN Accredited Registrars.
- Proxy Registrations may be used in General Availability.
- The Registry may reject, delete, revoke, suspend, cancel or transfer a domain according to the rules of the Registry-Registrar Agreement that will stand between the Registry and all the Accredited Registrars for any domain registration to be submitted and maintained.
- General Availability registrations may only be done for up to 10 years.
- Any domain active in the General Availability phase may be renewed so that the Registration is due for 10 years from the actual date.
- Domains may only be registered and renewed for year periods.

IDN implementation:

IDN domain names are supported for the Latin alphabet from the first day of General Availability and for all the phases of the Gradual Offering plan. IDNs for other character sets as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, etc. will be implemented over time if there is a demand for such names. IDN implementation will follow all of ICANN´s guidelines.

Auction rules:

When contention occurs in any initial phase of the launch of the domains under the extension an auction will apply between qualified applicants. All the auctions will take place at the same time. The Registry has considered both the possibility of running the auctions internally or outsourcing the auction process.

The following considerations have been initially drafted:

Timeframes:

- Auctions will be held for a period of 60 days with every auction lasting 5 days or 120 hours.
- Batching of the auctions will be done by alphabetical order.

System:

- The auctions will be conducted through an online bidding system.
- Applicants must agree to the terms and conditions of the online bidding system. If the applicant does not agree to the terms and conditions the auction will still take place and the winner of the auction will be assigned the domain name. The Registry, the auction provider if any, the registrar and any other related party will not be liable in the case an applicant fails to use the auction system.

Bidding:

- Bidding will start at 1 dollar and will have increments as implemented in the auction system.
- Proxy bidding will by allowed in the auction system.
- Extensions will also be done in case bidding is active at the final periods of the auction.

Payment:

Applicants will be required to pay within 30 days of the end of the auction. Notices of the payment will be sent every 5 days to the applicant. If payment is not received by the term provided, the domain will be reauctioned between the other applicants 45 days after the initial auction ended. This process will repeat until a successful payment is received. If only 2 applicants are participating in the auction and one defaults in payment, the domain will be awarded to the other applicant free of fees.

Allocation:

Domains will be assigned to the Registrar through which the winning application was processed.

General policy considerations

Technical and Syntax requirements

- Domains consist exclusively of the letters A-Z, numbers 0-9, and hyphens.
- Domains cannot begin or end with a hyphen (-)
- Domains can´t have a hyphen in the 3rd and 4th position.
- Domains can´t exceed 63 characters excluding the TLD.
- Only domains with 3 or more characters may be registered through accredited Registrars.

Reserved domain names:

- Registry will reserve all the names as instructed by ICANN in Specification 5 of the Registry agreement and any changes that may occur in the future.
- The Registry reserves the right to reserve domain names for its personal use or mere ownership at any time. The Registry will allocate or register such names as allowed by ICANN provided that Registry Operator may reserve names from registration pursuant to Section 2.6 of the Registry Agreement. The reservation of the domain names will be inline with section B of Specification 9 of the Registry Agreement.
(Note: It is important to note that part of the Registry´s marketing activities will be to develop and promote sites under the .LEGAL extension. These sites will be reserved and will be used by the registry in the process of marketing the extension)
- Release of reservations: Registry will undertake discussions with ICANN and the GAC relating the release of names reserved according to Section 5, Specification 5 of the Registry Agreement.
- 1 and 2 character domains will be reserved by the Registry as allowed by ICANN policies.

Compliance:

- Registry will implement and hold related parties responsible for the implementations of policies required by ICANN, including UDRP, URS, PDDRP, and any other policy that were to be determined by ICANN. Please note that RRDRP does not apply in this case as the TLD is not a community based TLD.

Privacy Policy:

A Privacy Policy will be developed regarding the access, destination and usage of all the external information at the Registry. The objective of the Privacy Policy is to allow the Registry to use the information to successfully develop the extension while maintaining companies and individuals safe from any unwanted usage of private information.

Specific information about the collection, destination and usage of private information will be publicly posted. The privacy policy will be in line with the best practices of privacy standards and ICANN recommendations about the matter.

Protection of private information from Registrants:

- Privacy registration or Proxy registrations are allowed after the domains are available to the general public. This allowance will comply to ICANN´s resolutions about WHOIS information and any other related determination made about the privacy of registrant information.

- Our privacy policy will be clear on the possible usage, destination and collection of data from Registrants. This policy will be strictly implemented and followed as part of our commitment of maintaining a reliable trustworthy extension.

Protection of information from all other stakeholders will be done through an internal policy framework in which usage and access to information will be strictly controlled. The best practices regarding transmission and storage of information will be implemented to guarantee the security of information available to the Registry.

Outreach and communications will help achieve our projected benefits. Outreach and communications will help achieve our goals because:

- By marketing and communications we will achieve the awareness we use about the existence of the extension.
- Communications and marketing will communicate the ideas behind the extension.
- Communications will also allow us to spread the word about the existence of the .LEGAL.

For the points outlined above, our outreach and communications strategy will support and contribute to achieve our goals.

What operating rules will you adopt to eliminate or minimize social costs (e.g., time or financial resource costs, as well as various types of consumer vulnerabilities)? What other steps will you take to minimize negative consequences/costs imposed upon consumers?

Social costs have been identified by us to be:

- Costs related to defensive registrations
- Costs related to processes of recovering a domain from an abusive registrant
- Time spent in the above processes
- Time wasted because of confusion

Costs related to defensive registrations and costs related to processes of recovering a domain from an abusive registrant: Our operating rules aimed at minimizing these social costs are:

- We will not incentivize defensive registrations.
- We will implement URS, UDRP and every other standard rights protection mechanism.
- We will use the means at our reach to promote and facilitate URS processes regarding potential infringement of trademarks.

These policies and procedures are the tools ICANN has put in place to reduce the costs when abusive registrations occur. A registry such as the one planned for .LEGAL will have open registry policies and therefore is not absent to this situation. Nevertheless we will focus a lot on that our marketing strategy communicates the processes available for trademarks to react to abusive registrations.

Furthermore, our allocation of domains will be done through an ordered plan that seeks to assign domains in a fair organized and consistent manner. The Gradual Offering Plan we have detailed in the policy section also aids in the reduction of social costs by providing an organized distribution structure.

We will hold Sunrise, Landrush, the Geographic protection program, and will open up for General Availability at pubic and well communicated moments in time. There will be enough time between them and enough communication and outreach activities to ensure information is available to all interested parties. The Sunrise period, intended to allow IP right holders to protect themselves. The Landrush period, to allow early registration of domain names before the General Availability time after which the First Come, First Served rule will apply. And the Geographic Protection Program to give priority to governments and local authorities. This will allow us as stated before to launch the extension through a consistent and fair process.

i. How will multiple applications for a particular domain name be resolved, for example, by auction or on a first-come/first-serve basis?

Multiple applications for a particular domain may only happen on the Gradual Offering plan of the extension. This plan includes Sunrise, Landrush, and Geographic protection program phases.

If two applications for the same domain were to be received the following rules apply:

- If two requests are received for the same domain under the Geographic Protection Program, the Registry will reserve that domain and at the cost of the Registry will create a landing page that redirects to sites as instructed by the contending applicants in a fair manner. Registration fees will be assumed by applicants and will be divided among the contending applicants. The Registry reserves full rights to modifying the landing page and exclude the presence of any applicant´s presence if the applicant were to cease payment or any other reason as determined by the Registry.

- If a request under the Geographic Protection Program were to match a Sunrise request, the Geographic request will prevail and the Sunrise request will not be entertained. Every valid request on the Geographic Protection Program phase will be temporarily reserved by the Registry until the outcome of the registration is defined.

- If any other two requests are made by any two applicants in the same phase (Sunrise or Landrush) the following rules also detailed in the policy section apply:

Auction rules:

When contention occurs in any initial phase of the launch of the domains under the extension an auction will apply between qualified applicants. All the auctions will take place at the same time. The Registry has considered both the possibility of running the auctions internally or outsourcing the auction process.

The following considerations have been initially drafted:

Timeframes:

- Auctions will be held for a period of 60 days with every auction lasting 5 days or 120 hours.
- Batching of the auctions will be done by alphabetical order.

System:

- The auctions will be conducted through an online bidding system.
- Applicants must agree to the terms and conditions of the online bidding system. If the applicant does not agree to the terms and conditions the auction will still take place and the winner of the auction will be assigned the domain name. The Registry, the auction provider if any, the registrar and any other related party will not be liable in the case an applicant fails to use the auction system.

Bidding:

- Bidding will start at 1 dollar and will have increments as implemented in the auction system.
- Proxy bidding will by allowed in the auction system.
- Extensions will also be done in case bidding is active at the final periods of the auction.

Payment:

Applicants will be required to pay within 30 days of the end of the auction. Notices of the payment will be sent every 5 days to the applicant. If payment is not received by the term provided, the domain will be reauctioned between the other applicants 45 days after the initial auction ended.

This process will repeat until a successful payment is received. If only 2 applicants are participating in the auction and one defaults in payment, the domain will be awarded to the other applicant free of fees.

Allocation:

The winner of the auction will have the name registered at the registrar through which the application was submitted.

After the domain is available for public registration domains will be awarded by a first com/first serve basis.

ii. Explain any cost benefits for registrants you intend to implement (e.g., advantageous pricing, introductory discounts, bulk registration discounts).

We are planning the following pricing strategies along with our Marketing campaign:

First year registration price reduction. To incentivize registrations and reduce barriers to registrants we may have temporary campaigns where we will reduce the price for the 1st year of registration. This will allow us to structure marketing campaigns with our Registrar partners to promote the extension.

iii. Note that the Registry Agreement requires that registrars be offered the option to obtain initial domain name registrations for periods of one to ten years at the discretion of the registrar, but no greater than ten years. Additionally, the Registry Agreement requires advance written notice of price increases. Do you intend to make contractual commitments to registrants regarding the magnitude of price escalation? If so, please describe your plans.

Commitment of price escalation: We are committed to serve our registrants in the best way possible. We understand the importance of having a consistent price structure and policy. Therefore our commitment to registrants will be the following.

- For the first five years of operation of the .LEGAL registry there will be no price increases. No one year term of registration or renewal will be higher than 15 USD as per our pricing strategy.

- After the 5th year the highest increment in the domain registration prices will be 5% yearly, or as low as commercially practicable.

These policies will be implemented at the wholesale level. Registrars may or may not transmit this structure to their registrants.

Geographic String protection

We will comply to the reservation as indicated Specification 5, Section 5 in the agreement but will also allow the assignment of all the Reserved domain names and other geographic strings to the authorized government or local authority under a plan called: Geographic Protection Program.

Timeframe:

The Program will run concurrent to the Sunrise phase.

Applicable strings (Strings that may be delegated in the second level through the program):

- All the reserved names as required by ICANN under the Section 5 of the Specification 5.
- Every Subdivision name listed as in the ISO 3166-2 standard for every country in the 3166-1.
- The generally known capital city of every country in the 3166-1 list. (Advice will be requested to the GAC for the appropriate list to be used)

If the strings include letters like "á", "é", "í", "ó", "ú", "ü" "ñ", these may be replaced for corresponding letters like "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", or "n", or the conventionally accepted characters.

Contention:

If two requests are received for the same domain, the Registry will reserve that domain and at the cost of the Registry will create a landing page that redirects to sites as instructed by the contending applicants in a fair manner. Registration fees will be assumed by applicants and will be divided among the contending applicants. The Registry reserves full rights to modify the landing page and exclude the presence of any applicant´s presence if the applicant were to cease payment or any other reason as determined by the Registry.

If a request under the Geographic Protection Program were to match a Sunrise request, the Geographic request will prevail and the Sunrise request will not be entertained. Every valid request on the Geographic Protection Program phase will be temporarily reserved by the Registry until the outcome of the registration is defined.

Special Considerations

- This program will have no costs for governments other than the normal registration and renewal fees.

- Requests must be done directly with the Registry.
- Registrant must choose a Domain Registrar to register and maintain the domain name. (With the exception of contended applications) Failure to renew the domain is at the absolute responsibility of the Registrant.
- Proxy Registrations may not be used in the Program. Registrations may change their records to Proxy records after the extension is released to General Availability.
- Only Local Governments may apply for the program. GAC advice will be requested for the validation of the Registrant.
- The Registry may reject, delete, revoke, suspend, cancel or transfer a domain according to the rules of the Registry-Registrar Agreement that will stand between the Registry and all the Accredited Registrars for any domain registration to be submitted and maintained.
- Every domain included in the program but not requested by the candidate registrant, may be released for public registration with the exception of the domains that must be reserved according to the Registry Agreement with ICANN.
- Registry may also register any of the names that are subject to the program to be used at Registry discretion, provided that Registry Operator may reserve names from registration pursuant to Section 2.6 of the Registry Agreement. The reservation of the domain names will be inline with section B of Specification 9 of the Registry Agreement.