.بازار

Status:	Delegated
Language:	Arabic
Translates to:	"bazaar"
Manager:	CORE
Registry Provider:	CORE
Type:	IDN gTLD
ASCII Translation:	.xn--mgbab2bd
Category:	Commerce
PIC Submitted:	Yes, Download Here
Priority #:	74

بازار is an IDN gTLD being proposed in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant is CORE. The TLD translates as "bazaar" from Arabic. The proposed application succeeded and was delegated to the Root Zone on 18 February 2014.

Application Details

Excerpted from applicant response to question #18 in TLD application:

"The word ʺبازارʺ denotes ‘a place of commercial activity’ in virtually all languages that use the Arabic script. This script is used across a large swath of territories including large parts of South, West, and Central Asia, as well as in North Africa, such as Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, Urdu and Malay (as written in Jawi). The word is understood by over 500 million people in territories where the national language is generally written in Arabic script.

While the word is probably of Persian origin, it has been adopted in the vernacular of many languages and regions albeit with slight variations in interpretation and with local flavour. It has been used variously to denote a shop, a market, an enclosed assemblage of alleys - each alley acting as a modern day ‘portal’- offering a particular set of products or services, a network of merchants and dealers, a seemingly chaotic congregation of peddlers, and other media of commercial activity.

A full meaningful word is of greater intuitive appeal and higher intrinsic value as a TLD in the language communities that use the Arabic script since acronyms and abbreviations are not in common use there.

While to date, most IDN TLDs, assigned or proposed, have been language-specific, a cross-language TLD such as .بازار offers an opportunity for a non-ASCII TLD to exhibit the potentialities inherent in non-Latin scripts to enhance the cause of the internationalization of the Internet across multiple geographies.

A technical merit of the proposed string is that it has no variants, so it can safely be adopted for the cross-language purpose at hand.

The proposed TLD .بازار recalls the original mission of .com, as spelled out in RFC 1591 by the late Jonathan Postel, to serve as an identifier for commercial entities. While the dearth of TLDs and the explosion of Internet derailed that original purpose and made .com synonymous with Internet presence, we hope that the semantic weight of .بازار and the opening up of TLD space will preserve the original focus of this TLD. We believe such a focus will endow added value to this identifier in search engines, while most open gTLDs hardly serve any purpose in Internet search.

Registrations under the .بازار TLD are available for strings in Arabic string only, according to the rules and IDN Table porvided in Q44 below, and subject to bona-fide use of the .بازار TLD for commerical purposes, and subject to the further requirement that the registrant’s use of the registered domain name, must be:

- generally accepted as legitimate; and

- beneficial to the mission and purpose of the .بازار TLD, and

- commensurate with the role and importance of the registered domain name."

Contract Signed

On 31 October 2013, CORE received a Registry Agreement signed by ICANN for .بازار after passing the Initial Evaluation.

Delegation and Availability

.بازار was delegated to the Root Zone of the DNS on 18 February, 2014, completing the successful application for the string.