.voting

gTLD
Type	gTLD
Status	ACTIVE
Region	EUR
Country	Switzerland
Registry	TLD-BOX
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.voting is an active TLD in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The proposed application succeeded and was delegated to the Root Zone on 29 January 2014. The manager is Valuetainment Corp., with back-end registry support provided by "TLD-Box Registrydienstleistungen GmbH".

Application Details

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

"The proposed .voting gTLD will be the trustworthy online space dedicated to carrying out votes, polls, surveys or hosting forums for the exchange of opinion. It will:

• make it easier for users to find information about polls or forums
• provide for a safer and more secure surfing experience and reduce the risk of users being deceived by illegitimate offers, and so mitigate the risk of users becoming victims of abusive behaviour and malicious conduct.
• help leverage the potential of the Internet and its users to voice their opinion and exchange thoughts.

The applicant, Valuetainment AG, Switzerland, was founded in 2005 and has a lot of expertise in the area of conducting polls. The applicants offers the so called Votingtool (votingtool.com), which gives private and commercial customers the possibility to obtain the opinion of readers, viewers, customers, friends, employees, fans or other target groups. The subject of such polls may be political questions, products, movies, pictures, to name a few examples. At the time of drafting this text, the Votingtool is used by more than 30,000 customers. The experience in this business led to the idea of the .voting gTLD.

Both registrants and Internet users will benefit from transparent rules for the TLD, in terms of acceptable use versus abuse and also in the area of data protection. This will make it easier for registrants to achieve their goal, namely obtaining opinions from as many users as possible, and also easier for Internet users to participate, since they will know that .voting domain names are governed by policies ensuring a high quality standard and high reputation. Since the .voting gTLD allows for IDN registrations in either Latin or Cyrillic character sets at the second level, the namespace is attractive to both registrants and Internet users in Europe, Russian speaking countries and the US and Australia, which are the key markets for the applicant. The applicant will have information on the registry’s website in all respective languages and provide FAQs and support in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Russian.

adi-iii. In order to achieve this, the .voting gTLD will be based on the following pillars:
A. The namespace will indicate to Internet users that their opinion will be asked for. As a self-explanatory TLD, it will make it easier for those who are conducting a survey, a poll or providing a forum for discussion to direct Internet users immediately to such offers.
B. The proposed .voting gTLD is a place on the Internet run exclusively for surveys, polls or forums. No other content or services are allowed (with the exception of the domain names run by the registry itself). C. All websites accessible via a .voting domain name must have information on the provider of the service if personal data of the users is collected, and have a privacy policy which clearly explains to the user how the information that is collected will be used.
D. Freedom and diversity of expression is a core value of the .voting Registry. Thus, forums for the exchange of information can be provided without disclosing the identity of the operator. However, this may only be done in compliance with the rules established by the .voting Registry and provided that no information on the user is gathered beyond the information that is inevitably submitted by the user’s computer and that such information is not stored by the website operator beyond potential legal requirements.
Summarising,the .voting registry will establish and communicate three rules:

• You will never be asked financial information such as your credit card number on a .voting domain name (except on websites operated by the registry).
• Whenever you are asked to provide your name, address or e-mail address or other personal data, you can expect to be told who is collecting the information and to be given a clear explanation of what information is collected and how it is going to be used.
• If the operator of a website does not disclose its identity, you should never be asked for any personal data.
  

The .voting Registry will not only provide robust policies which clearly present the content restrictions and requirements, but also provide a response mechanism which enables users to report websites not abiding by the rules. .voting Registry will be responsive to such reports and escalate actionable reports in accordance with its Anti Abuse Policy. In order to stimulate (i) the use of the domain names as such and (ii) the creation of unique content, the applicant will offer all registrants of .voting domain names the “advanced” version of Votingtool, which they can customize to carry out their polls or surveys or use to manage their forum for free. Additional functionalities are present in the “premium” version of Votingtool, which can be purchased from the applicant. The Votingtool would be “glued” to the domain name as follows: The customer creates an account with Votingtool. During this process, the customer’s e-mail address is verified. The customer then downloads a preliminary installation package, which is a single file with a generated authentication token. This file is placed on the webserver connected to the .voting domain name. The customer then sends a verification request to Votingtool via a web interface. This establishes that the user of the Votingtool is actually the registrant of the domain name. Once the token has been verified, the service is unlocked and the customer can download the Software Development Kit (SDK) using the web interface on his web server. The applicant will provide the Votingtool in all languages covered by the proposed IDN characters. Support will be provided in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Russian."

Contract Signed

On 13 November 2013, Valuetainment Corp. received a Registry Agreement signed by ICANN for .voting after passing all the required processes needed to become a Registry Operator for the string.

Delegation and Availability

.voting was delegated to the Root Zone of the DNS on January 29, 2014, completing the successful application for the string.

Generic Top-level Domain

Top-Level Domain

Internationalized Domain Name