.thai

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Status:	Not Approved
Type:	Community
Category:	Culture
Priority #:	258 - Washington Team Tennis, LLC

.thai is a proposed TLD in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant is Better Living Management Company Limited. It is a Community Priority Application.

It is a ethno-geographic TLD aimed at promoting and reinforcing the community of Thai people and speakers throughout Thailand and abroad. The applicant is a Thai company, however, it failed to file the Public Interest Community (PIC) which drove the government to object to the application which could create the sensitivity issue for Thai people, as 'Thai' is the name of the country, its language, culture and geographical origin of the product from Thailand.

Its registration policies are: "Upon registration of a .thai domain name, a registrant must declare from where the proof of presence can be established, and what form of proof it is. A suggested list includes, but not limited to: nationality, business registration, organization, government, etc. BLM does not plan to validate the registrants’ proof-of-presence during the registration process, but rather will rely on the dispute resolution mechanism to allow interested users to dispute on the accuracy of the information."

Objection

The Thai Network Information Center Foundation (THNIC), which runs the ccTLD .th, filed an objection against Better Living Management Company's application for .thai. It objects on the following three grounds:

1. Better Living Management Company claims in their application to plan to work with THNIC, however THNIC says that no such agreement was made, and that it would not agree to such in the future, as BLM is for-profit and THNIC is non-profit.
2. "Thai" is a transliteration of Thailand's IDN ccTLD, .ไทย, and the two strings would be pronounced the same by a Thai reader, thus causing string similarity confusion.
3. "Thai" is also commonly used by locals as a way to reference the country of Thailand.

Although the United States government initially opposed the GAC objection to geographic-looking strings such as .thai, they put out a statement in July 2013 that revised their position, saying it would remain neutral in the case of .thai, thereby allowing the GAC to present a consensus objection regarding the string and all of its IDN versions.

Rejection

In November of 2013, ICANN designated the application as "Not Approved", meaning the application was formerly rejected by ICANN, who took the GAC objection into consideration. The application became only the 3rd one in the New gTLD Program to be formerly rejected.