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Bali to apply for .bali, and the dot is delightful
The regional government of the Indonesian province of Bali is to formally announce an application for the .bali top-level domain at ICANN 87 in October, according to a local report.
Governor Wayan Koster said the local government is supporting a bid for .bali, according to IndoBaliNews
It’s not clear from the report whether the government is the applicant or merely signing off on an application by a third party, which is a necessity under ICANN’s rules regarding geographic strings.
What makes the proposal for .bali uniquely interesting — delightful, even — is that the dot also has meaning.
The Balinese word “dot” means “want”, so it’s not too much of a stretch to interpret .bali as “I want Bali”. The marketing is built-in.
This is handy given that tourism apparently accounts for 80% of Bali’s economy.
According to DI Stringtel, the only significant wrinkle to the application would be that Bali is also the name of a small town in Rajasthan, India, which also enjoys geographic protection.
.bali is only the third geographic gTLD to be announced that I’m aware of. The other two were .india and .bharat, both of which were announced by the Indian national registry, NIXI.
As I reported last year, the two Indian bids would likely be rejected because there’s a hard ban on country names under ICANN’s rules.
Bali will host ICANN’s Annual General Meeting in October, following the postponement of the Oman meeting.
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