.helsinki
| Status: | Proposed |
| country: | Helsinki, Finland |
| Registry Provider: | Afilias |
| Type: | GeoTLD |
| Priority #: | 148 |
More information: 
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.helsinki is a geographical TLD proposed in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant is the City of Helsinki.[1]
Application Details
The Following is excerpted from the applicant´s response to question #18:
"The University of Helsinki registered the domain name www.helsinki.fi in the year 1987. The University of Helsinki has not been willing to assign the right of ownership of the domain name www.helsinki.fi to the City of Helsinki.
The City of Helsinki registered the domain name www.hel.fi in the year 1994. This name is a serious problem for the findability of the City website. Almost all other cities in Finland have the name of the city as their domain name, and Helsinki, the capital of Finland, is one of the few exceptions.
The name www.hel.fi has no meaning in the Finnish language and it is difficult to connect the name with the City. Therefore many visitors and residents of Helsinki accidentally go to the pages of the University of Helsinki, when looking for information about the City.
The University has consented to put some information about the City to www.helsinki.fi, but this has only further distracted the visitors and residents. The www.helsinki.fi website contains only links in three languages to direct visitors to the information and services located at the www.hel.fi domain (about 50 000 web pages and over 200 eServices and forms in six languages). Visitors who only read the www.helsinki.fi pages will not find these services.
The new gTLD domain .helsinki will solve the problems described above. It will improve the findability of the City web pages and help both visitors and residents to find the extensive services provided by the City.
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The new .helsinki domain names will be granted to the different City departments and other City units by the City of Helsinki Economic and Planning Centre, IT department, in collaboration with the City of Helsinki Administration Centre, Communications Office. The Communications Office will decide whether the new names proposed by the City departments are adequate from the communication and marketing point of view, and the IT department will decide whether there are any technical problems connected with the proposed names. If there are multiple applications for the same name, the Communications Office will decide who will get the domain name in question. This procedure is already in use in www.hel.fi.
All domain names will be granted free of charge, and only to the City departments and other units which belong to the City of Helsinki, like the City subsidiaries and foundations."[2]