.uol

Status:	Delegated
Type:	Brand TLD
Priority #:	1009 - UBN INTERNET LTDA.
More information:

.uol is a Brand TLD that was proposed in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The successful applicant and now Registry Operator is UBN INTERNET LTDA.

Application Details

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

"Our mission is to provide content of great quality, safety and innovation in services and multiple option of entertainment. The word universe is the root of our brand, and we offer an infinite universe of digital content and services to internet users and companies. The TLD .uol will have the mission to contain itself all this universe of digital content and show it to the world with quality, security, innovation and variety. Our name itself seems like a TLD: UOL. This Acronym which is used to designate Universo Online and shows itself so strong as a brand that we rarely use the extended version. We were the first content portal in Brazil, founded in 1996. Sixteen years later we are the biggest content portal in Portuguese distributed in more than 1,000 channels and we reach seven in ten Brazilians on the Internet. According Ibope⁄NetRatings (a joint venture between Grupo Ibope, a Brazilian research company, and Nielsen NetRatings) we have more than 33.1 million unique visitors per month (reach of 68% of Brazilian active users). Our home page has 5 million daily unique visitors and 35 million page views daily according to measurement tool we use in our site: Omniture SiteCatalyst. Beyond our own digital content, UOL offers contents from prestigious channels worldwide such as The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, USA Today, BBC and Reuters available in Portuguese. As well TV UOL, pioneer in audiovisual contents in Brazil, offers entertainment contents in partnership with Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, VH1, Discovery and BBC in Portuguese. In addition to this amount of contents and channels, we offer several internet services to private individuals and companies, from price comparison for consumers to secure data center services for some of the Brazilian largest e-commerce companies. The recent acquisitions and mergers turned UOL into one of the strongest communication and technology groups in Latin America.

..

Our universe under a unique extension! The gTLD “.uol” will be the reason for unifying the services we provide to end users with benefits for ours branding efforts, in business and marketing perspectives. We already have a strong brand and we are the biggest in content and one of the biggest in internet services in Brazil and Latin America. More than innovation, these touch points give us the status needed to offer a reliable navigation experience with the new TLD and reinforce our brand in the world of Internet. To be one of the first is also important to us because, as a pioneer company on the Internet in Brazil and Latin America, we also want to be in the new top level domains segment. Another point is to avoid any type of typosquatting⁄cybersquat⁄cybersquatting and⁄or frauds. As UOL has many services and partners in its content, even with our several security levels, this kind of security layer will guarantee the content origin and tenting its legitimacy, which benefits the company and users for creating the separation between our own sites, our partners and our platforms of services. With the gTLD “.uol” it would be possible to create individual domains to each partner and service and still keep them related to UOL´s brand, creating an information barrier to separate and isolate services, avoiding the user´s information interchange between these services and preventing conflict of interests, just as indicated in Chinese Wall concept. Besides, the gTLD “.uol” will be a closed register system and only UOL will be able to create domains, which increase even more security by assuring that when someone is visiting a “.uol” domain this person is really seeing UOL´s content, making difficult phishing practices. All “.uol” management will be done by UBN Internet Ltda. and private individuals won’t be allowed to request registration."

Contract Signed

On 1st May 2014, UBN INTERNET LTDA. received a Registry Agreement signed by ICANN for .uol after passing the Initial Evaluation.

Delegation and Availability

.uol was delegated to the Root Zone of the DNS on the 16th August, 2014, completing the successful application for the string.

Top-Level Domain