Comments to the Draft Applicant Guidebook V2

["Roy E DeFee" <roy-defee@xxxxxx>]

We request that the gTLD rules change to allow a gTLD of .4u. 

 

There are a large number of domain names that contains 4u or references to
4u. After much research, we have discovered it is a universal expression
implying individual ownership (emotional association) across many world wide
languages. It's very interesting that the second largest group of visitors
to 4u.com after the US is China. 

 

Using search engine Google, there are 1,290,000 URL's that have the
combination of "4U" somewhere in the URL. Yahoo identifies 773,000 URL's
containing "4U". We did additional research looking immediately to the left
of the TLD in a domain name string loking for 4u using only .com and .net
and there were 190,000 names which would be ideal candidates for a .4u gTLD
name. There are a large number of domain names under the country code TLD's
with the largest numbers are associated with .de and .uk. So we know there
is an inherit desire for a 4U designation. There are also 60,500 names that
have permutations of 4u such as foru, 4you and foryou so 4u is very
emotional appealing. You is a very interesting concept as illustrated by
Times making it the person of the year for 2006 with means that it's 4U.

 

There are three areas where a two digit gTLD conflict with current rules:

 

1)       The paragraph immediately in front of tag 2.1.1.4 indicates that
all TLD must be 3 characters in length. With the current process of looking
into IDN's of 1 and 2 characters we feel we would fit into this arena. 

2)       Following tag 2.1.1.3.2 there is a restriction that a TLD can not
start or stop with a numeric character. We understand that IETF is removing
this restriction except for a numeric 0 or a numeric 1. We request this be
changed to allow for a TLD to start with a valid acceptable numeric
character. 

3)       After tag 2.1.1.4.1 there a restriction that 2 digit TLD's are
reserved for country codes. There are no country codes that have a starting
numeric digit. In addition there are some 2 digit TLD's that are not country
codes. With these two items in mind we think that a gTLD of .4U would be
very successful.   

 

Roy E. DeFee



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