.catalonia

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Status:	WITHDRAWN
country:	Catalonia, Spain
Registry Provider:	CORE
Type:	GeoTLD
Priority #:	1310

.catalonia was a geographical TLD proposed in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant was Government of Catalonia. The application was withdrawn in June 2013.

Application Details

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

"The information gathered in response Question 18 is intended to inform the post-launch review of the New TLD Program, from the perspective of assessing the relative costs and benefits achieved in the expanded TLD space. For the application to be considered complete, answers to this section must be fulsome and sufficiently quantitative and detailed to inform future study on plans vs. results. The New TLD Program will be reviewed, as specified in section 9.3 of the Affirmation of Commitments. This will include consideration of the extent to which the introduction or expansion of TLDs has promoted competition, consumer trust and consumer choice, as well as effectiveness of (a) the application and evaluation process, and (b) safeguards put in place to mitigate issues involved in the introduction or expansion. The information gathered in this section will be one source of input to help inform this review. This information is not used as part of the evaluation or scoring of the application, except to the extent that the information may overlap with questions or evaluation areas that are scored. An applicant wishing to designate this application as community-based should ensure that these responses are consistent with its responses for question 20 below.

The .catalonia TLD is requested by the Generalitat of Catalonia (the Government of Catalonia) as an institutional TLD for its own exclusive use in order to identify and promote Catalonia worldwide.

The main goal of .catalonia is to give the Generalitat an up-to-date means of external communication to promote Catalonia by publishing information to the world on what this territory offers.

The Generalitat will reserve the .catalonia TLD for its own exclusive use, and the .catalonia TLD will serve institutional purposes within the scope of the Generalitat’s activities. The Generalitat of Catalonia will act as the only registrant of the .catalonia TLD.

Catalonia is located in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, bordered to the east by the Mediterranean sea and to the north by the mountain range of the Pyrenees. It covers an area of approximately 32,000 km² and has a population of over seven million inhabitants. The Generalitat of Catalonia is applying for the .catalonia TLD to protect its own brand and to promote Catalonia worldwide as a complement to its existing branding and communication strategies both online and offline.

The name Catalonia has already been registered as a US trademark by the Generalitat of Catalonia since 2008 with the registration number 3462412

In recent years the Generalitat of Catalonia has been actively marketing to the world various aspects of the cultural values such as its urbanism (well-known architects such as Antoni Gaudí), its history, its gastronomy (cooks such as Ferran Adrià and Carme Ruscalleda), sports (Futbol Club Barcelona), its landscape (Pyrenees, Costa Brava), its universities, its business opportunities, its creativity, its design, its fashion, and its entertainment (film festivals, exhibitions, music festivals). Nowadays the quickest and easiest way to reach a worldwide public is the Internet, and with the easy-to-remember .catalonia TLD it would be easier to increase the visibility and popularity of the region all over the world.

Some of the promotional efforts that the Generalitat of Catalonia has undertaken in the past have been on behalf of the following tourist locations: Barcelona, Costa Brava, Costa Daurada, Costa del Garraf, Costa Barcelona-Maresme, central Catalonia, Terres de Lleida, Pirineus, Val d’Aran and Terres de l’Ebre. All these touristic clusters would be promoted within the .catalonia TLD. The Agència Catalana de Turisme (Catalan Tourism Agency) is in charge of tourist development and outreach for the Generalitat.

The .catalonia TLD would also be used as a quick way to give advice to tourists and travelers and to promote Catalonia among travel agencies all over the world. For example, .catalonia could be used to promote PR campaigns under the following possible domain names: visit.catalonia, discover.catalonia, enjoy.catalonia, holidays.catalonia, hotels.catalonia, museums.catalonia, study.catalonia, and many others.

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1. The Generalitat of Catalonia will register and maintain all domain name registrations within .catalonia for its own exclusive use; and that
2. The Generalitat of Catalonia will not sell, distribute, or transfer control or use of any registrations in .catalonia to any third party that is not related to the Generalitat of Catalonia; and that
3. application of the Code of Conduct contained in Specification 9 of the Base TLD Registry Agreement to .catalonia is not necessary to protect the public interest[.]"