[Comments-cct-rt-draft-report-07mar17] DotBZH comment on CCTRT on Draft Report of Recommendations for New gTLDs

[Matthieu Crédou]

We welcome the opportunity offered by the CCTRT to share our experience 
as a new gTLD registry serving a local community, namely the Breton 
community defined by a geographical (West of France) as well as cultural 
and linguistic proximity.

We fully agree on the definition of trust suggested by the CCTRT Report 
: Familiarity and security. These are the pillars of our value 
proposition to our community.

Our daily work is focused on the first one, familiarity. As most 
community/geographic gTLD, we care about usage of domain names as much 
as registration numbers. We commonly use as Key Performance Indicators 
such metrics as number of active domains, number of websites appearing 
in the Alexa Top 1 million ranking and number of pages under .bzh 
indexed by Google.

Until recently, we mainly addressed security though our restricted 
registration policy, our pricing policy (our wholesale price is 35€) and 
our relatively small domain space coupled with a proximity to most 
actors within the region which allow us to closely monitor new 
registrations. Since late 2016, with the help of Afnic, our technical 
backend and abuse monitoring service provider, we have turned our 
contractual obligation to comply the Specification 11-3b into of one our 
main selling point. On top of notifying registrars upon detection of an 
abuse, we decided to notify registrants. This feature has been active 
for a few months but has been promoted for only a few weeks. 
Nonetheless, the results of our new service have already been very 
positive.

Our very first cases allowed to follow-up the abuse mitigation directly 
with the registrant (Have you received the notice? Do you understand it 
? Do you know how to solve the issue ? [a week later] Is everything okay 
now ?). We do not resolve the issue for them but we make sure their 
webmaster has the correct information. In all cases, the problem was 
solved within a few of days. Registrants were all grateful for the 
proactive help we provided.
On a larger scale, we find this new service very useful in explaining 
the higher pricing of our local gTLD compared to our market leaders. We 
now put forward this feature of .bzh as one of our key selling points. 
Given the current popularity of the topic of “cyber security”, our new 
feature announcement was very well received by the local media.

We firmly believe that establishing consumer trust through familiarity 
and security is essential to the success of our gTLD. As a non-profit 
organization, it is our first goal. We hope our actions will help 
illustrate the advantages brought to consumers by most of GeoTLD, 
creating a new level of proximity in the domain name industry.

*Background on .bzh*

The .BZH registry is a non-profit organization which aims at serving the 
Breton community. Our activities are mainly based in Bretagne, France.
Our application was supported by the Regional Council of Brittany as 
well as the French Government.
Our organization is a member of the RySG.

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