.wang

Status:	Proposed
Registry Provider:	KNET
Registry:	Zodiac
Registry Backend:	ZDNS
Type:	Generic
Category:	Technology
Priority #:	154 - Zodiac (Zodiac Leo Limited)
nTLDStats
Registrations:	55,078
Parked Domains:	92,631
Parked Domain %:	100 %
Important Dates
Delegation:	03 January 2014
General Availability:	29 June 2014
More Information:

.wang is a proposed TLD in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant is Zodiac (Zodiac Leo Limited).

Application Excerpts

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

"Zodiac Holdings Limited (“Zodiac”) was founded and incorporated in Cayman Islands by James Seng in 2008 in anticipation of the launch of the ICANN new gTLD program. Currently, it is headquartered in Hong Kong and has an operation center in Beijing, China. The team consists of experienced veterans in the global and China domain name industry like James Seng and former China Network Information Center (CNNIC) employees such as Eugene Li.

James Seng is one of the Internet pioneers in Singapore and is widely recognized as an international expert in numerous Internet areas. He is well known as the inventor of IDN and has co-chaired the IDN Working Group in IETF from 1999 to 2004, leading to the standardization of IDN.

Eugene Li, is the former Vice President of China Network Information Center (CNNIC). During his 7 years tenure at CNNIC, Eugene has launched initiatives that doubled domain name registrations and helped CNNIC become the no. 1 ccTLD and no. 2 TLD by volume. At the time when Eugene left to join Zodiac, CNNIC has over 13 million domain name registrations.

Under the vision and leadership of James Seng, with the support of angels, venture capital firm and family offices of approximately USD 20 million in place for the application and operation of the new gTLDs, Zodiac is seeking to become the first and largest privately held ICANN-approved TLD registry operator in Asia. It intends to operate TLDs that are centric to the Chinese culture. ..

For this application, Zodiac Leo Limited (“the Applicant”), a wholly owned subsidiary of Zodiac is applying for “.wang”. For ease of reading, “wang” will be referred to as “STRING” in the remaining part of this application.

The Applicant’s vision for “.STRING” is to be a connected namespace for everyone that want to attract and serve the Chinese Internet population and help promote innovation, participation and collaboration among them.

Unfortunately, due to restriction of the new gTLD applicant Guidebook, the Applicant is not allowed to pursue its more favorable single-char IDN string “.网”. Instead, the Applicant will have to adopt its hanyu pinyin (a way to transcribe Chinese characters into Latin script) form “STRING” which means “website or portal”. To the Chinese community, “STRING” is commonly used to append to names or generic terms to refer to the website or portal of those names. For example, the name of sina.com.cn website in Chinese is pronounced as 新浪网 xin lang “wang” (“网” being the last word).

A lot of Internet related terms in Chinese already contain this character. For example, network is known as “STRING” + luo, Internet community is “STRING” + min etc. This high level of occurrence of this “STRING” term implies a general acceptance by and stickiness in the memory of the Chinese Internet community if there is such a “.STRING” gTLD."

Contract Signed

On 24 October 2013, Zodiac received a Registry Agreement signed by ICANN for .wang after passing the Initial Evaluation.