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.Gay domain names are coming later this year

Top Level Design, the .gay registry, is preparing for the launch of .gay domain names on October 11th, 2019.

This past week, they convened an advisory council meeting within community members to better refine the mission and purpose of .gay.

Some questions they wanted to address were:

  • Who could benefit from the use of a .gay domain name?

  • How is the .gay domain going to fit in greater LGBTQ2SIA+ community?

  • What is our mission statement and purpose as we launch the .gay domain name?

Some of the themes they identified as a group included:

Privacy & Safety

How would they handle situations of protecting people’s privacy and ensuring that .gay is a safe space on the internet?

Corporate Responsibility

How would they ensure that our company acts in a responsible way when issues arise from the abuse of .gay domain names?

Promoting Good Content

We all know the internet has been used as a “cesspool” for harmful and derogatory content over the last 20 years. So they wanted to discuss ways in which they could promote good content to be used on .gay, like using .gay domain name for businesses that cater to gay clients, or organizations and events that support the gay community.

Core Partnerships

They identified one theme as the need to partner with organizations and allies of the gay and LGBTQ+ community. By offering this new domain name option to community organizations, they could feed off of each other to promote .gay and make it available to anyone in the world who identifies as gay.

Here is what the registry’s mission and purpose in their own words:

Mission & Purpose

After all of this discussion, we arrived at two key conclusions:

1.)   We answered the question “Who is .gay for?” and came up with a succinct tagline.

2.)   We defined The mission & Purpose of .gay

Who is .gay for?

If we had to boil down into one sentence a tagline for the .gay domain name, it would be: “.gay, a domain name extension for anyone who identifies as gay.”

.gay is part of the LGBTQ+ community, but it certainly doesn’t act as an umbrella term. For that reason we found that people who identify as gay can definitely use a .gay domain name.

The Mission & Purpose of The .gay Domain Name

The Mission & Purpose became: Provide a Space for Gay People to Celebrate & Connect.

We chose the word “space” because having a .gay domain name signals to visitors that the website is a place for gay content and customers. The word “connect” was chosen to symbolize how both website creators and visitors can connect with each other by having a simple identifier on the domain name URL of the website. By seeing that detail, .gay would let people know what you do as a business before they even arrive to the website.

 

The registry thanked the following people for sharing their ideas and positive energy:

Cameron Whitten, Executive Director of Q Center, Pdxqcenter.org

Logan Lynn, Musician & Thought Leader, Loganlynnmusic.com

Kellie Peterson, Head of Domains @ Automattic, WordPress.com/domains

Julia Whelan, Business Consultant, JuliaWhelan.com

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About Konstantinos Zournas

I studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and I am now living in Athens, Greece. I went online in 1995, started coding in 1996 and began buying domain names and creating websites in 2000. I started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

One comment

  1. You got to wonder about some of these companies

    “We all know the internet has been used as a “cesspool” for harmful and derogatory content over the last 20 years.”

    Sounds like they are trying to make it out to be both a community extension but run by as for profit. I don’t think people will buy it and the extension will be a flop.

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