.sakura

Status:	Delegated
Registry Provider:	Sakura Internet Inc.
Type:	Brand TLD
More information:

.sakura is a new Brand TLD delegated to the Root Zone in ICANN's New gTLD Program on 02 July 2015. SAKURA Internet Inc. will provide front-end and back-end registry services. This will be a Closed TLD, wherein the second-level domains are registered only for internal corporate purposes.

Application Details

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

"SAKURA Internet Inc. (ʺSAKURA Internetʺ) was established on August 17, 1999, and in just 6 years of rapid growth, we became a public company on October 12, 2005, listed under Tokyo Stock Exchange MOTHERS (Market Of The High-growth and EmeRging Stocks) :Code 3778. Since the IPO, our business has maintained a steady performance and growth by carrying out our services with a company motif, ʺSAKURA,ʺ which has attracted widespread popularity, and we have become one of Japanʹs leading IT companies. While we have been considered as a blue-chip company, securing investorʹs confidence for a long period of time, SAKURA Internet has been selected as one of the 15 component stocks of ʺTokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Core Index.ʺ

SAKURA Internet is a datacenter services provider, and our core businesses are comprised of FIVE service operations: (1) the Colocation services; (2) the Shared Hosting services; (3) the Dedicated Hosting services; (4) the Virtual Private Server (VPS) services; and our most recent business development (5) IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Cloud Computing services.

We have launched our internet hosting services in December of 1996, prior to the incorporation, and we have been growing the number of users successfully since then. As of March 2012, we are one of Japanʹs top-class independent data center services providers, and proud of the number of zones delegated by sakura.ne.jp in use that has grown up to approximately 500,000.

The proposed concept (goals) of the ʺ.sakura Initiativesʺ encompass several ideas: (A) protecting the momentum of our business growth and 16 years worth of our penetration with the ʺSAKURAʺ Internet brand, by applying ICANN for ʺ.sakura;ʺ (B) leveraging ʺ.sakuraʺ effectively to achieve advanced user-friendliness and to gain the loyalty of our customers for the purposes of consumer trust and choice; (C) taking advantages of a safer and more secure domain name environment by providing ʺ.sakuraʺ for the purposes of creating new projects and conducting various research and studies; and (D) implementing an environment where we plan =〉 develop =〉 commercialize new features to establish an optimized and most advanced ʺservice value chain,ʺ by adopting ʺ.sakuraʺ for the purpose of promoting robust competition.

ʺ.sakuraʺ is a significant opportunity for SAKURA Internet, which is currently in practice to operate and manage all the data center services on a one integrated platform. For instance, by consolidating the SAKURA Internet domain name environments, we will attain the opportunity to directly contribute to improve service levels, user experiences and brand awareness. Furthermore, since SAKURA Internet has been conventionally user oriented in practicing research and preventive management for the countermeasures against abusive uses and fraudulent activities, by implementing the new gTLD we will be able to enhance our capabilities to research and plan for a safer and more secure environment for the use of internet. Consequently, along with the price reduction achieved by our economies of scale, our capabilities will lead to a healthier and robust competitive services market. We feel certain that this process of enhancement will contribute to our innovative future goal of ʺexporting the Japanese data center services in overseas,ʺ and to the further penetration of and fulfilling the needs for the use of domain names.

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(2) SAKURA Internet will be the sole Registrant of the proposed .sakura, and we will primarily control the use of the SLDs by our own registration policies and through a process of qualification, restricting the use within ourselves. Therefore, as an assumption, we expect no multiple domain name applications for the same name space. Example of the SLDs:rentalservername.sakura, r&dprojectname.sakura[.]"