.edeka New gTLD Application

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New gTLD Application Submitted to ICANN by: EDEKA Verband kaufmännischer Genossenschaften e.V.

String: edeka

Originally Posted: 13 June 2012

Application ID: 1-1297-3451

 

Applicant Information

 

  1. Full legal name

EDEKA Verband kaufmännischer Genossenschaften e.V.

 

  1. Address of the principal place of business

New-York-Ring 6

Hamburg  22297

DE

 

  1. Phone number

+49 4063770

 

  1. Fax number

+49 4063773140

 

  1. If applicable, website or URL

http:⁄⁄www.edeka.de

 

Primary Contact

 

6(a). Name

Ms. Katrin Ohlmer

 

6(b). Title

Consultant (CEO DOTZON GmbH)

 

6(c). Address

 

6(d). Phone Number

+49 30 49802722

 

6(e). Fax Number

 

6(f). Email Address

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

Secondary Contact

 

7(a). Name

Mr. Johannes Lenz-Hawliczek

 

7(b). Title

Consultant (DOTZON GmbH)

 

7(c). Address

 

7(d). Phone Number

+49 30 49802721

 

7(e). Fax Number

 

7(f). Email Address

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

Proof of Legal Establishment

 

8(a). Legal form of the Applicant

German registered Association under german law (Eingetragener Verein).

 

8(b). State the specific national or other jursidiction that defines the type of entity identified in 8(a).

German law (especially §§ 53-64c Law of Associations [Genossenschaftgesetz, GenG], §§ 21-79 German Civil Code [Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB], articles of association (cf. § 63c GenG).

 

8(c). Attach evidence of the applicant's establishment.

Attachments are not displayed on this form.

 

9(a). If applying company is publicly traded, provide the exchange and symbol.

 

9(b). If the applying entity is a subsidiary, provide the parent company.

 

9(c). If the applying entity is a joint venture, list all joint venture partners.

 

Applicant Background

 

11(a). Name(s) and position(s) of all directors

Ralf Gerking Director

 

11(b). Name(s) and position(s) of all officers and partners

Jürgen Reutenauer special Representative (Besonderer Vertreter) iaw. § 63b Abs. 5 GenG

 

11(c). Name(s) and position(s) of all shareholders holding at least 15% of shares

 

11(d). For an applying entity that does not have directors, officers, partners, or shareholders: Name(s) and position(s) of all individuals having legal or executive responsibility

 

Applied-for gTLD string

 

  1. Provide the applied-for gTLD string. If an IDN, provide the U-label.

edeka

 

14(a). If an IDN, provide the A-label (beginning with "xn--").

 

14(b). If an IDN, provide the meaning or restatement of the string in English, that is, a description of the literal meaning of the string in the opinion of the applicant.

 

14(c). If an IDN, provide the language of the label (in English).

 

14(c). If an IDN, provide the language of the label (as referenced by ISO-639-1).

 

14(d). If an IDN, provide the script of the label (in English).

 

14(d). If an IDN, provide the script of the label (as referenced by ISO 15924).

 

14(e). If an IDN, list all code points contained in the U-label according to Unicode form.

 

15(a). If an IDN, Attach IDN Tables for the proposed registry.

Attachments are not displayed on this form.

 

15(b). Describe the process used for development of the IDN tables submitted, including consultations and sources used.

 

15(c). List any variant strings to the applied-for gTLD string according to the relevant IDN tables.

 

  1. Describe the applicant's efforts to ensure that there are no known operational or rendering problems concerning the applied-for gTLD string. If such issues are known, describe steps that will be taken to mitigate these issues in software and other applications.

We anticipate the introduction of the .EDEKA TLD without operational or rendering problems. Based on a decade of experience launching and operating new TLDs, Afilias, the back-end provider of registry services for this TLD, is confident the launch and operation of this TLD presents no known challenges. The rationale for this opinion includes:

- The string is not complex and is represented in standard ASCII characters and follows relevant technical, operational and policy standards;

 - The string length is within lengths currently supported in the root and by ubiquitous Internet programs such as web browsers and mail applications;

 - There are no new standards required for the introduction of this TLD;

 - No onerous requirements are being made on registrars, registrants or Internet users, and;

 - The existing secure, stable and reliable Afilias SRS, DNS, WHOIS and supporting systems and staff are amply provisioned and prepared to meet the needs of this TLD.

 

  1. (OPTIONAL) Provide a representation of the label according to the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/).

 

Mission/Purpose

 

18(a). Describe the mission/purpose of your proposed gTLD.

The applicant, EDEKA Verband kaufmännischer Genossenschaften e.V. (applicant’s name from now on shortened to “EDEKA e.V.”; e.V. is the German acronym for “eingetragener Verein”: registered association), is an association of nine regional cooperatives and further companies like the EDEKABANK. EDEKA e.V. has a group’s 2010 turnover of over € 43 billion in total and is a leading company in the German grocery market. The EDEKA group has a history in grocery retailing for more than 100 years, the first predecessor has been founded in 1898. The association has its registered office and principal place of business in Hamburg, Germany. The duration of the association is not restricted to a certain period. The object of the association is the legally required auditing of its nine members, the cooperatives, and to be the custodian of the EDEKA brand and thus the group’s representative in all brand related affairs.

 

According to the latest ranking of Interbrand from February 2012 the brand EDEKA comes in second on the list of the “Germany‘s Most Valuable Retail Brands”.

 

EDEKA e.V. is applying for the .EDEKA top-level domain with the following mission and purpose:

 

The .EDEKA top-level domain is intended to serve the needs of its community and to benefit its community in terms of (a) differentiating, protecting and expanding its brand, (b) promoting its brand to the public and stakeholders, and (c) creating added value for its brand by enhanced consumer trust and reliability in the digital space. The .EDEKA top-level domain will provide easy recognizable domain names for Internet users in general.

 

The .EDEKA top-level domain has the purpose to supports the goals of the EDEKA e.V. in becoming Germany’s number one retail brand through continuous growth and by positioning the company as a highly attractive employer and delivering an excellent brand experience. The .EDEKA top-level domain will also aim to substantiate EDEKA’s brand claim “Wir lieben Lebensmittel” (We love food).

 

EDEKA e.V. hereby states that according to Specification 9 Para. 6 in the New gTLD Agreement

 

(i) all domain names in the .EDEKA top-level domain will be registered to, and maintained by, EDEKA e.V. for its own exclusive use,

 

(ii) EDEKA e.V. will not sell, distribute or transfer control or use of any registrations in the .EDEKA top-level domain to any third party that is not an Affiliate of EDEKA e.V., and

 

(iii) the application of the Code of Conduct to the .EDEKA top-level domain is not necessary to protect the public interest.

 

18(b). How do you expect that your proposed gTLD will benefit registrants, Internet users, and others?

i.

 

The .EDEKA top-level-domain and its .EDEKA domain names are dedicated and thereby specialized to create content, facilitate communication, information and distribution in connection with the brand EDEKA between all parties involved in the business of EDEKA e.V. worldwide, but particularly in Germany.

 

The most important service level of the .EDEKA top-level-domain is the certainty for Internet users that all .EDEKA domain names are exclusively registered and maintained by a trusted source, the EDEKA e.V. They will understand that only EDEKA e.V. can register a domain name and all domain names which end on .EDEKA are owned by EDEKA e.V. and not by someone who just pretends to be EDEKA. Aim is that Internet users worldwide will be aware that domain names branded by the famous brand extension .EDEKA are a hoard of security, stability and reliability. This will lead to awareness among Internet users that .EDEKA is a trusted namespace on the Internet. Thus it will become a symbol of quality for Internet users worldwide.

 

The .EDEKA top-level-domain will be a namespace with support of the whole group, ranging from the wholesale and finance, administrative, human resources and sales to the marketing department and including the whole management team. It is the aim that such a secure namespace will quickly gain a substantial reputation among the global Internet community and EDEKA customers.

 

 

ii.

 

The .EDEKA top-level domain will enhance competition in the global domain name business by introducing a dedicated namespace for the brand EDEKA. Thus, large grocery retail groups face the challenge to offer customers a secure, reliable and trustworthy namespace like EDEKA does with .EDEKA. Customers will have the expectation that brands of large grocery retail groups will have an own namespace on the internet.

 

The .EDEKA top-level domain and its .EDEKA domain names are clearly differentiated to existing top-level domains, especially due to their descriptive and branded nature which has a clear meaning and value to the targeted audience. Today Internet users cannot be sure that domain names incorporating EDEKA under one of the existing TLDs really belong to EDEKA or to someone else who is not affiliated with EDEKA and merely tries to use this brand for his own purposes. Furthermore, only content which is issued by EDEKA will be displayed under .EDEKA domain names which differentiates EDEKA from all other grocery retailers who will not operate their respective brand as a top-level domain.

 

The .EDEKA top-level-domain and its .EDEKA domain names are innovative due to the new category of TLDs which brands like EDEKA are creating: “Domain names with the ending .EDEKA exclusively belong to EDEKA”. The novelty is the creation of real trust and reliability for Internet users due to the fact that all .EDEKA domain names are exclusively registered and maintained by a trustworthy source, the EDEKA e.V. Together with other brand top-level domain registries EDEKA will work on creating awareness on this new namespace “category”.

 

 

iii.

 

Improved search rankings

 

Today users do not know whether to search edekagroup.com or edeka.de, elkos.de or buy-elkos.com, or even edekaretail.com. With a .EDEKA top-level domain the user will experience a much more intuitive way of finding EDEKA content on the Internet. They can either type in the exact domain name, since many big companies are expected to operate their .brand and thus type-in traffic might increase for brands. Furthermore this will be supported by the algorithms of big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. As of today ranking results in search engines incorporate, among many other elements, the top-level as well as the second-level in relation to the search. Therefore it is to be expected that search engines will incorporate the .brand top-level domain as being a relevant part of the search. This effect has been forecasted by major IT researchers, among them Forrester: According to Forrester Research (Oct 2011) „Search engines will give authority to dot-brand TLDs”. Search engines make their money from advertising, and search traffic comes from providing the most relevant, authoritative results to a user’s query. Since companies that get TLDs will have gone through a rigorous 8-12 month validation process, Google, Bing, and Yahoo will adjust their algorithms to give authority to these TLDs.“

 

EDEKA e.V. is expecting that such a shift in search engine rankings will also positively affect the search engine positioning of the EDEKA brand and the respective websites under .EDEKA.

 

 

Umbrella brand strategy

 

With a .EDEKA top-level domain EDEKA will be able to setup an umbrella brand strategy with .EDEKA acting as the umbrella and all EDEKA trademarks underneath on the second level. Users will then be able to connect the company name with the products even via domain names, for instance through riogrande.edeka, selection.edeka, bio.edeka and neukauf.edeka.

 

 

Enhanced trust and reliability

 

With the .EDEKA top-level domain EDEKA e.V. is expecting to deliver enhanced trust and reliability in the digital space for suppliers, partners and customers based on content and services under domain names with the extension .EDEKA since there will be only one authoritative entity able to register domain names – EDEKA e.V.. Especially the suppliers might access further information about the EDEKA products via a secured login page, they will get the certainty that they log into a real EDEKA website.

 

It is planned that intuitive domain name categories such as division.edeka, product.edeka, city.edeka, services.edeka will deliver due to their descriptive nature a much more intuitive access to the resources of EDEKA for customers, business partners, employees and other stakeholders. Instead of clicking through the hierarchies of a website or searching on websites users will have a whole new level of direct access to the relevant content they have been searching for.

 

 

iv.

 

EDEKA e.V. is the operator and thus registry for the top-level domain .EDEKA. It allows the registration of second level domain names below the TLD .EDEKA.

 

* Purpose *

 

The TLD .EDEKA can be exclusive used by EDEKA e.V. and its affiliated companies in the Internet, especially for the operation of websites, email communications and other DNS-based services. The domain names under the TLD .EDEKA are not available to the public for registration and active use. EDEKA e.V. will act both as a registry, as well as the sole beneficiary registrant. As far as EDEKA e.V. acts as the registry, it is hereinafter referred to as a registry. If EDEKA e.V. acts as eligible registrant, it is referred to as registrant.

 

The rights and obligations of the Registry for the operation of the registry are regulated in the contract between the registry and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN below) – the Registry Agreement (at present by the Applicant Guidebook dated January 11, 2012) - and is part of the registration conditions. The following statutes constitute the rights and obligations of EDEKA e.V. to third parties and themselve.

 

* Domain registration *

 

A domain below the TLD .EDEKA can only be registered through the Registry-accredited registrars, which are concurrently accredited by ICANN.

 

The legal relationship between the registry and the registrars are governed in the ʺRegistry Registrar Agreementʺ, which is also subject to these policies.

 

For registrations, EDEKA e.V. registrant has to pay the required fee at the respective registrar. The same applies for changing the registrar as a provider through the registrant.

 

* Eligibility *

 

The right to register domain names under the TLD .EDEKA only belongs to the EDEKA e.V.. Therefore it acts both as a registry for the TLD .EDEKA, as well as registrant of domain names under the TLD .EDEKA. As far as EDEKA e.V. acts as registrant of domain names, it is party to the relevant registration by the registrar. The registration and ⁄ or management of domain names through a trustee, so-called proxy service is not permitted.

 

* Registrable characters *

 

All characters and strings of ASCII code with 1-63 characters can be registered as a domain name. Domain names with two characters are temporarily not allowed. If at the request of the Registry at ICANN domain names with two characters will be released, these are also available for registration. Also all ʺInternationalized Domain Namesʺ (all available IDN Table) can be registered. This means that all character sets that contain a hyphen both at the third and fourth place, are excluded from registration.

 

* Reserved Domain Names *

 

Reserved and excluded from registration by an accredited registrar are all domain names defined in ʺSpecification 5ʺ to the ʺRegistry Agreement of the Applicant Guidebook (currently as of 01⁄11⁄2012). In ʺSpecification 5ʺ, paragraph 4, reserved domain names, according to the ʺSpecification 5ʺ to ʺRegistry Agreement of the Applicant Guidebook (currently as of 11.01.2012) are registered by the Registry directly. In accordance with ʺSpecification 5ʺ, paragraph 2 and 5, reserved domain names can be registered by an accredited registrar, according to the ʺSpecification 5ʺ to ʺRegistry Agreement of the Applicant Guidebook (currently as of 01⁄11⁄2012) after release.

 

* Assignment of domain names *

 

Although only EDEKA e.V. is entitled to register domain names under the TLD .EDEKA, according to the requirements of the Registry Agreements of the Applicant Guidebook (as of 11⁄01⁄2012) a so-called ʺsunrise periodʺ for the protection of specific rights is preceded. The ʺsunrise periodʺ is subject to the provisions of the Trademark Clearinghouse Applicant Guidebook (currently as of 01⁄11⁄2012). Prerequisite for applying for a domain name during the Sunrise Period is the eligibility under the TLD .EDEKA. Moreover, the order of registrations based on the principle ʺfirst come first servedʺ

 

* Registration period *

 

Domain names can be registered for 1 - 10 years. The registration of an .EDEKA domain name follows the normal “gTLD life cycle”.

 

* Registration termination of a domain name *

 

A termination of the registration of a domain name shall be carried out by the Registrar, at the discretion of the registrant and requires no justification. If in the notice no actual calendar day on which the termination shall take place is determined, the registration of the domain name is terminated with immediate effect. With the effective date of termination of the terminated domain name is deleted.

 

* Transfer of a domain name *

 

The transfer of registered domains, paid or free, to another registrant as EDEKA e.V. is prohibited. Both the corporate transfer (sale of shares), as well as the transfer of the registry as an asset sale must be approved by ICANN.

 

* Content and use of registered domain names *

 

EDEKA e.V. operates services, especially websites and email services, which are associated or connected with a registered domain name, by themselve. She is entitled to authorize the use and operation of such DNS-based services to third parties. In this respect the only authorized entities are EDEKA e.V. and all affiliated entities of EDEKA e.V.. The use of registered domain names and related services is permitted only for business-related purposes of EDEKA e.V.. A domain name cannot be made available for use by a third party who is not entitled to use.

 

* Abusive registration and ⁄ or use of a domain name *

 

It is illegal to use a domain name, either as registrant or user to whom the domain was left to use, abusive. Abusive is any use that is prohibited under German law. This is especially true for domain name registrations which violate trademark or name or personal rights. Examples for abusive use are, but not limited, spamming (sending unsolicited bulk mail), phishing (fraudulent data collection) and the infringing content from websites. For obvious abusive registration or use the Registry is entitled to delete the domain name, without prior consultation of the user.

 

* Dispute procedures *

 

The registry has established three arbitration proceedings outside the jurisdiction generally. This is the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP http:⁄⁄www.icann.org⁄en⁄help⁄dndr⁄udrp), Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS according to Applicant Guidebook, Version 11.01.2012) and the Trademark Dispute Resolution Procedures Post-delegation (PDDRP according to Applicant Guidebook, include module 5, §5.4.1, Version 11⁄01⁄2012). All registry accredited registrars are required to include UDRP, URS and PDDRP, as applicable part in the registration agreement. If a UDRP proceedings brought by a non-authorized third party in which the third party prevails, the third party cannot achieve the transfer of the domain name, but only the deletion of the domain.

 

* Whois *

 

The Registry maintains a publicly accessible database in which all data of the registrant of a domain name in accordance with the Specification 4 and 10 of the Applicant Guidebook (currently as of 01⁄11⁄2012) and the RFC 3912 will be published. This includes the specification of the registrant of the domain name with name, postal address, email, phone and fax, the appointment of an Admin C, Tech C and optionally a zone manager who is published, with details in the Whois database. Admin C, Tech C and Zone Manager can be specified using the contact details of the company for which they are employed. To prevent misuse of the Whois database, the registry will secure access to Whois data via a CAPTCHA code and limit the access through the number of query requests per IP address, or otherwise.

 

v.

 

The WHOIS data of all .EDEKA domains will be visible to the public, although a captcha module prevents from automated inquiries. Bulk access to WHOIS data will not be allowed according to ICANN specifications. In addition EDEKA e.V. will establish an abuse point of contact. The .EDEKA TLD will not offer or allow privacy of confidential information of registrants.

 

vi.

 

EDEKA invests a multi-million EURO budget annually for marketing its products, brands and services to end-customers and Internet users which means that domain names are included on nearly all promotional materials.

 

In the future after the approval of .EDEKA this marketing power will be used for the promotion of domain names with the extension .EDEKA in order to create a quick uptake in awareness of the new .EDEKA domain names worldwide.

 

18(c). What operating rules will you adopt to eliminate or minimize social costs?

i.

 

Multiple applications for a particular domain name will be resolved through a first-come, first-serve process within EDEKA e.V.. However the only eligible registrant will be EDEKA e.V.. Since all domain names are registered for EDEKA e.V. as domain name owner, transfers are not allowed.

 

 

ii.

 

Since all domain name are exclusively registered and maintained by EDEKA e.V. there are no cost benefits.

 

 

iii.

 

All domain names are exclusively registered and maintained by EDEKA e.V.. EDEKA e.V. does not plan to make contractual commitments to registrants with regards to price increases or decreases, domain names will be sold to the only registrant EDEKA e.V., the wholesale price will be defined on the discretion of the Registry. EDEKA e.V. will comply with the rules ICANN set up in the New gTLD Registry Agreement for price increases. Domain names can be registered for periods of 1 to 10 years.