dotCYM has been campaigning for a top level Internet domain name for the Welsh cultural and linguistic community since 2005. If Wales is successful in bidding for its own domain name, we will have access to:

• Good domain names for Welsh businesses (short, descriptive, and memorable) which will be much cheaper than the thousands of pounds that good .com names now cost.
• A home for Welsh culture of every type to demonstrate the richness of our Welsh heritage and the opportunities we have for a better quality of life.
• A domain name structure which supports the Welsh language and addresses bilingualism and gives a renewed focus for Welsh literature and Welsh speaking communities.
• A significant boost to marketing Welsh businesses with our own portals – hotels.cym and visit.cym will boost tourism and cut advertising costs (at the moment, a search for ‘welsh hotel’ on Google returns 3,460,000 results, but we have less than 5000 hotels and B&Bs – a wide range of non-local resellers are responsible for the extra results, and the extra costs they create are passed on to visitors, making us less competitive)
• Better search results – Google and Yahoo have confirmed that local domains like .cym will score higher in searches including related terms like Wales or Cymru.

Our own domain will also result in more Welsh internet spending remaining in Wales – at the moment, Welsh internet users spend most of their money outside Wales, which is a damaging drain our economy cannot afford. Highlighting Welsh businesses will make it easier for people to choose Welsh companies. What’s more, a .cym extension will make it easier to police eCrime in Wales, as well as eCrime which targets Welsh internet users, making Wales a safer place to be online.

http://www.dotcym.org

Consumer Benefits: Residents of Wales and speakers of Welsh
Supporters: Cardiff City Council (capital of Wales); Deputy Leader Cllr Neil McEvoy; Tom Brooks, Westminster All Parliamentary IT Committee; Peter Black AM; Bethan Jenkins AM; Jill Evans MEP; Welsh Language Board

The Arab League hopes to operate a major Arabic online hub after structural changes to the internet, including the introduction of Arabic-language web addresses, are implemented in the coming year.

The league plans to compete with domains such as “.com” and “.net” with its own “.arab” domain, registered in Arabic and Latin characters. The system that manages web addresses is undergoing its most significant change in decades, allowing the use of international scripts such as Arabic, Chinese and Hindi, and liberalising the registration process for top-level domains, such as “.org”.

Consumer Benefits: 175 Million Arabic Speakers
Supporters: The Arab League

Consumer Benefits: 10 million Zulu tribe members
Supporters: King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu, king of the Zulu Nation

Consumer Benefits: 10 million+ environmentally-conscious individuals and businesses
Supporters: Sierra Club (1.2 million members), Alliance for Climate Protection (4 million members), Surfrider Foundation (50,000 members), Al Gore

According to Big Room Inc., Dot Eco will be a strong, sustainable and transparent place on the Internet for millions around the world. It will ask people to share their eco-impact and take action to help the planet when they register Dot Eco domains for their companies, organisations, products, or even themselves. All that sustainability information will be made transparent to the public. A quarter of the sales from Dot Eco names will go to environmental and social causes, creating a massive fundraising engine for bettering the world. This could include causes like climate change, oceans, wildlife preservation, poverty, clean technologies, as well as support for eco-research and innovation. Domain names are uniquely able to fight for our planet because they are global, accessible from any web browser, any time, anywhere, and already used by millions of organisations, companies and individuals. Once Dot Eco is built, it’s going to make it much easier for small and large businesses, organisations and individuals around the world to calculate, share and compare their eco-footprints. www.doteco.info

Supporters: Terra Pass, Green Cross International

Supporters: Earthshare, the Trust for Public Land,

dotGAY LLC seeks to apply for the .gay top level domain. According to dotGAY LLC, “The gay community will benefit (from introduction of the TLD). The gay community has roughly 15 million members in the United States and tens of millions world wide. Millions of internet websites are targeted on the gay community. A well managed top level domain .gay will help to connect the gay end user and those who try to reach out to him.” www.dotgay.com

Consumers Benefits: .gay will provide a web extension for the 8.8 million gay, lesbian and bisexual persons in the U.S. alone.
Supporters: Both .gay efforts are working with leading gay rights groups.