For further details please look at The Global Name Registry’s Market Forecasts (Appendix D.3).

2. We have submitted a response to Mr. David Kam and The North Pole of America’s claim to have trademark rights in the use of “.NAME” as a top-level domain. We are not aware of any other claims.

Mr David Kam’s claim has only been brought to our attention through his comment on the ICANN public forum comment list. We have not received any other correspondence in this regard. Based on the available information, it is our profound opinion that the claims are unfounded. We have submitted an argument of our opinion on the public forum discussion list.

Firstly, we have not found any trace of a trademark application on the strings “name”, “.name”, “dot name” etc. The company The North Pole of America has however lodged an application consisting of the strings “dot name dot name”. It is not clear to us whether the repetition is intentional or an error.

Secondly, we are of the opinion that the US Patent and Trademark Office will not grant this application, based on the same arguments as their dismissal of CORE’s application for “.web”.

Thirdly, we have also noticed that the US District Court Central District of California, in Image Online Design, Inc. v. CORE Ass’n did not find that the plaintiff had common law trademark rights in “.web”. We are of the opinion that the same will apply to The North Pole of America’s use of “.name”.

The above is a summary of our argument submitted on the ICANN public forum under the thread for our application.

3. The Global Name Registry intends to indemnify ICANN for claims arising from legal challenges regarding our right to operate the new TLD. Such an obligation must be included in the delegation agreement with ICANN.

You ask us to identify and describe in detail the resources we propose to utilize for the indemnification. We are uncertain what is meant by this sentence. The indemnification will of course be monies, and it will equal any damages you are obligated to pay, either direct, indirect or exemplary, by a court order under any relevant legal jurisdiction.

In return we will be asking for your reasonable co-operation in the event we have to defend our right to operate the new TLD.

We have not decided whether we will be willing to take out an insurance to your benefit to cover any indemnification claim by you.

4. First, GNR would like to emphasize that our application is primarily for .NAME, while the strings .NOM, .SAN, .XING and .JINA (withdrawn due to misleading placement on the ICANN site) are our suggested future expansions in the personal domain space, to accommodate other cultures and languages once the market need for .NAME is proven.

We choose in the following to consider the questions 3-5 as if our secondary strings, not meant to be introduced isolated, were to individually replace the primary string, .NAME, since we suspect the original wording of the questions to be a typing error. (Another applicant’s name was listed in the mail)

Hypothetically, if GNR should receive .NOM as a new TLD instead of .NAME, it is our opinion that the market demand would be slightly lower than what has been projected for .NAME. This would, however, not materially inflict on the viability of the Registry, although GNR estimates that the demand in the North American market would be lower than projected. Demand in Europe, on the other hand, would rise, but not enough to reach a global overall penetration like projected. .NOM, instead of .NAME, would therefore enjoy a lower growth and adoption rate, but not enough to threaten the business plan of GNR and its viability.

Thus, the delegation of .NOM instead of .NAME would not materially deteriorate the GNR operating conditions.

5. (Please also note the remark under Question 3)

Hypothetically, if GNR should receive .SAN as a new TLD instead of .NAME, it would have a significant impact on the pro forma financial statements submitted with our application. .SAN is suggested as an extension to the personal demand space to be added once the need for .NAME is established and once .NAME enjoys a high number of registrations. GNR suggests .SAN as a secondary string, and we do not believe that introducing .SAN isolated would have the same commercial success as .NAME.

The introduction of a new, personal gTLD will need to be accompanied by significant marketing in order to establish the concept of a personal space on the Internet. While the multi-lingual side of the Internet is evolving, GNR believe it is of importance to have a TLD that can easily fit into the English nature of much of today’s Internet.

It is our opinion that .NAME would enjoy a global market until other extensions reflecting other cultures and languages could be introduced, while this is not the case with the secondary strings suggested.

In this context, it would make less sense to introduce .SAN alone in the first phase than .NAME. It would significantly lower the general uptake and the number of registrations, since .SAN addresses particular markets only, like i.e. the Japanese market.

We therefore believe it is of importance that .SAN is considered in a second introduction of new gTLDs, or in combination with .NAME in the first introduction, but not isolated in the current phase.

Thus, should GNR be delegated .SAN (a secondary string) instead of .NAME (the primary string), it would materially weaken the market demand and render the GNR business model inoperative.

6. (Please also note the remark under Question 3)

(This answer is parallel and comparable to Answer 4)

Hypothetically, if GNR should receive .XING as a new TLD instead of .NAME, it would have a significant impact on the pro forma financial statements submitted with our application. .XING is suggested as an extension to the personal demand space to be added once the need for .NAME is established and once .NAME enjoys a high number of registrations. GNR suggests .XING as a secondary string, and we do not believe that introducing .XING isolated would have the same commercial success as .NAME.

The introduction of a new, personal gTLD will need to be accompanied by significant marketing in order to establish the concept of a personal space on the Internet. While the multi-lingual side of the Internet is evolving, GNR believe it is of importance to have a TLD that can easily fit into the English nature of much of today’s Internet.

It is our opinion that .NAME would enjoy a global market until other extensions reflecting other cultures and languages could be introduced, while this is not the case with the secondary strings suggested.

In this context, it would make less sense to introduce .XING alone in the first phase than .NAME. It would significantly lower the general uptake and the number of registrations, since .XING addresses particular markets only, like i.e. the Chinese/Mandarin market.

We therefore believe it is of importance that .XING is considered in a second introduction of new gTLDs, or in combination with .NAME in the first introduction, but not isolated in the current phase.

Thus, should GNR be delegated .XING (a secondary string) instead of .NAME (the primary string), it would materially weaken the market uptake and render the GNR business model inoperative.

7. The Global Name Registry has designed the entire SRS system to handle far more than the projected average demand, from SRS high-availability front-end servers, middle-ware orderly queuing system to back-end parallell database system. In equilibrium, the system will provide an average througput of 40 registrations pr second.

During extreme high-traffic periods, the system will queue up requests and each Registrar will be served in an orderly round-robin fashion. If requests come in at higher frequencies than 40 per second, the transaction time will go up, and the system will limit the throughput in order to ensure that above all, registrations are done fairly, orderly and with stability.

Our projected best-case demand for registrations is 2 million the first year, or an average of 1 registration every 15 seconds. With 40 registrations per second, the entire year’s volume could be processed in 14 hours.

Since it is extremely unlikely that the entire volume of registrations should arrive during few hours, it can seem that the solution is largely overscaled. However, we anticipate that there will be periods of extreme demand, like shortly after opening, and that the registration traffic will follow the cyclic, “spiky” pattern of most network traffic.

The prime objective for designing the solution to the given number is not to provide the highest possible number of registrations per second, but to create a system that above all is stable and secure, and that will orderly serve even in the worst high-traffic periods, i.e. shortly after opening the new TLD. A system designed for 40 registrations pr second will above all be a secure, stable and reliable system, with the necessary redundancy to minimize downtime.

In conclusion, the system proposed will have an average internal transaction time of 0.025 seconds. In the case of queuing, the transaction time would go up and if the load gets too high, the system will in a controlled and temporarily fashion reject new requests in order to ensure a reasonable response time. The worst-case response time can be expected to be in the range of 5-10 seconds, which would constitute an acceptable waiting time in extreme high-traffic cases.

8. (See also the answer to question 7)

We are willing to commit to building and operating a system that will be able to handle a throughput of 40 registrations pr second. While this would theoretically handle the entire first year’s registrations in less than 24 hours, our prime goal with designing the system to 40 registrations per second is to ensure stability, security and redundancy.

This will when the system is in equilibrium give an internal transaction time of 0.025 seconds.

9. (See also the answer to question 7)

We are willing to commit to building and operating a system that will be able to handle a throughput of 40 registrations pr second. While this would theoretically handle the entire first year’s registrations in less than 24 hours, our prime goal with designing the system to 40 registrations per second is to ensure stability, security and redundancy.

10. (See also the answer to question 7)