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Galicia, Brittany and Wales request their own domain names from ICANN

Galicia, Brittany and Wales attempt to show that they fulfil requirements for top-level domains at the 32nd International ICANN Meeting · With its ‘Catalan culture’ domain Catalonia is currently the only stateless nation with its own top-level domain.

The 32nd International Public Meeting of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which addresses a wide range of issues related to the future of the Internet, including the creation of new domains and the incorporation of new alphabets and languages, is currently taking place in Paris. Three European nations attending the conference are to present the reasons why they believe they should have a sponsored Top-Level Domain (sTLD). An sTLD represents a community, such as the aviation industry (.aero) or Catalan language and culture (.cat), and is governed by a particular agency, such as the Fundació PuntCat (DotCat Foundation) which decides who can use that domain name.

Before approving an sTLD, ICANN requires a community to give unanimous support to the proposal and to present technical reports endorsing the project. ICANN also values support from abroad - from members of the community who live abroad, for example - as well as guarantees of financial viability from individual and business donors. Once these conditions are met, the community names an agency to be responsible for running the new domain name.

Although new domain names for Wales, Galicia and Brittany are not actually on the agenda for the meeting, the organizations representing these nations will use the occasion to raise awareness for their campaign and to seek support among ICANN members. While there are other European stateless nations seeking their own domain names, these three are the ones most likely to succeed because of the considerable backing for the proposals from their respective communities.

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