.hiphop
| Status: | Proposed |
| Registry Provider: | ISC |
| Type: | Generic |
| Category: | Culture |
| Priority #: | 1407 - Uniregistry, Corp. |
More information: 
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.hiphop is a proposed TLD in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant is Uniregistry.[1]
Application Details edit
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."[2]