.hiphop

Status:	Delegated
Registry Provider:	ISC
Type:	Generic
Category:	Culture
Priority #:	1407 - Uniregistry, Corp.
More information:

.hiphop is a gTLD that was proposed in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant and now Registry Operator is Uniregistry (UNR). Their application succeeded and was delegated to the Root Zone on 15 May 2014.

Application Details

The following is excerpted from the applicant's response to question #18:

"Hip hop is a uniquely American art form, crossing music, art, performance and culture. Since its advent in New York in the late 1970s, hip hop has become a global phenomenon.

.HIPHOP will serve Internet users as a clear, specialized, and semantically meaningful name for a wide variety of individuals and businesses. Whether used for lifestyle or music, .HIPHOP will convey a strong sense of a web publisherʹs values and content.

New top-level domains represent the future of naming for Internet-based resources. For a significant number of registrants and users, .HIPHOP is the most meaningful and accurate description of the content of the works or services a registrant might provide, or a user might seek, online.

DNS-based addressing brings with it unique advantages for branding Internet-based resources with semantic meaning and easily communicable and remembered labels. Domain Names are mnemonic devices, designed to help users remember and invoke the ʺlocationʺ of web sites, email servers, and the like (as opposed to having to remember IP addresses). The addition of many new, semantically meaningful, TLDs will enhance this mnemonic function, helping users to discover pertinent resources, differentiate among stored links, and remember how to reach sites they have visited before.

Top-level domains with specific semantic meaning, like .HIPHOP, will thrive when operated by a neutral registry-services provider like Uniregistry. A neutral registry does not provide preferential registration opportunities to any particular market participant, create anti-competitive rules that prevent domain name registration by competitors, or become so deeply involved in the target market that its presence as the registry services provider creates the appearance of impropriety or bias. Uniregistry always will act as a neutral services provider for .HIPHOP.

A specialized top-level domain string, like .HIPHOP, immediately conveys the purpose for which the user is seeking to access a site. Registrants who might get lost in a larger, undifferentiated TLD, and who seek to convey the specific purpose of the site or services, or who are unable to find a satisfactory SLD within existing TLDs, will find it easier to reach potential users.

.HIPHOP will be a specialty gTLD, with a flat pricing structure and fixed renewal costs, with no material price increases for the first five years. This moderately priced namespace is designed to offer registrants an attractive, competitive registration alternative or complement to existing registratiaons for the purpose of specialized content.

The registry will strive to bring value to both the users seeking to publish information and content related to hip hop culture and music and the registrants who are offering that information by providing directory services, traffic-generation toolkits, and search-related functionality from central registry-operated resources designed to promote the .HIPHOP top-level domain and the companies, organizations, and individuals choosing to register .HIPHOP names.

The registry will implement safeguards to intellectual property interests, while fostering socially and commercially productive growth of its name-space for registrants, stakeholders, and Internet users.

ABOUT UNIREGISTRY

Uniregistry Corp. is a new venture formed by established domain name industry veterans to serve as the delegated registry services provider for the .HIPHOP top-level domain.

The mission and purpose of Uniregistryʹs .HIPHOP gTLD is to be the pre-eminent general and generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) choice for registrants seeking to identity themselves with hip hop culture and music.

We want registrants in .HIPHOP to build their Internet services on a platform designed for long-term security, stability, and predictability in Internet naming. We will provide a sound foundation for registrants and their registrars by offering world-class technical infrastructure, excellence in organizational management, and low-cost, predictable pricing.

Uniregistry believes that first-come first-served is the most fair and inexpensive way to allocate registrations to the public. We plan egalitarian, flat-rate pricing made possible by the long-term payback horizon of our lead investor. Uniregistry plans to implement rate limited registration queues made equitable through a randomized, round robin acceptance of orders. This will make land-rush allocation of SLD registrations more balanced for all participants.

Uniregistry plans to improve the registration and ownership experience of registrants. These plans include ongoing post-registration redemption rights for outgoing registrants with a no-charge, 180 day suspension of expiring domain names to permit former registrants a long window to recover their accidentally expiring or forgotten SLD names, and to protect their residual reputation from harm or confusion with successive registrants. After names expire and an extended redemption period has passed, Uniregistry will delete names within a randomized one month window to avoid gaming of the deleted name stream by speculative entities with superior technical skills. Random deletion coupled with a registration query rate limit will permit would-be registrants of all levels of technical ability an opportunity to register their preferred SLD. Uniregistry plans to implement a ʺmust deleteʺ policy to work against such registrar warehousing of the expiring name stream and to give registrants of all levels of sophistication an opportunity to register their expiring name of choice."

Contract Signed

On 6 March 2014 Uniregistry received a Registry Agreement signed by ICANN for .hiphop after passing all the required processes needed to become a Registry Operator for the string.

Delegation and Availability

.hiphop was delegated to the Root Zone of the DNS on 15 May, 2014, completing the successful application for the string.

2021 Assignment Controversy

Uniregistry announced its intention to auction its new gTLD portfolio in January 2021 UNR subsequently announced that it intended to also transfer Ethereum Name Service (ENS) non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with each gTLD to the successful bidders for each TLD. The object of creating ENS tokens was to create ENS "domains" for cryptocurrency transactions and human-readable wallet IDs:

The auction winners of these rare internet assets not only collect subscription revenue by selling their domain names through ICANN-accredited registrars, but could also sell domains on ENS directly to Ethereum owners. "UNR is opening the scarce asset class of Top Level Domains to the public, which brings existing cash flow and numerous new monetization models to future owners, including control of the NFTs on the blockchain," said Shayan Rostam, Chief Growth Officer of UNR. "We are on the cutting edge; it's unlikely that these assets will ever take part in an event of this magnitude again."

"Web3" and cryptocurrency adherents saw the auction as "another interesting use case for NFTs that...show just one way that people are continuing to expand their use cases." However, the bundling of the NFTs with the TLDs created concerns at ICANN. In the wake of the auction, as assignment requests were submitted to ICANN by either UNR or the winning bidders, ICANN org submitted questions to UNR regarding the interrelationship between the ENS NFTs and the TLDs. ICANN's investigation of these issues is ongoing as of December 2021. Industry news outlets noted that the bundling of the NFTs may have caused incurable problems for all of the assignment requests.

Despite the .hiphop domain originally being advertised as part of UNR's April auction, Dot Hip Hop LLC (DHH) separately negotiated the purchase of the TLD in an arms-length transaction. UNR submitted the assignment request for .hiphop to ICANN in August 2021. The assignment was delayed for the same reasons as the other, auctioned TLDs.

In December, DHH submitted a reconsideration request regarding ICANN's inaction on the assignment request for the .hiphop TLD. In its request, DHH noted that it had spent considerable time explaining, and re-explaining, its position on the NFT associated with .hiphop, which was transferred as part of DHH's purchase agreement with UNR.

Top-Level Domain

Second Level Domain