.株式会社

The mission and purpose of the .株式会社 gTLD is to provide a trusted, native-language namespace built around the official Japanese corporate designation 株式会社 ("kabushiki kaisha," "KK"), which forms an integral part of the legal name of every stock company incorporated under Japan's Companies Act. A domain of the form [name].株式会社 lets a business use a fully Japanese-script identifier that mirrors its corporate name in commercial life, rather than relying on transliteration or a generic Latin-script TLD. The namespace is oriented primarily toward Japanese stock companies and founders and businesses forming, rebranding, or preparing to incorporate. Registration is open, first-come first-served, on equivalent published terms through all ICANN-accredited registrars, consistent with the Registry Operator Code of Conduct (Specification 9). The Registry deliberately imposes no upstream eligibility screening and no one-domain-per-company cap. This reflects genuine market needs: a founder can secure a name before formal incorporation — a legitimate step, since a trade name is often reserved before the entity legally exists — and a group can hold several names covering its trade names, brands and subsidiaries. This mirrors the established model of comparable corporate-designation gTLDs such as .inc, .gmbh, .sarl and .ltd, which operate as open namespaces rather than gated registries, and avoids the adoption friction of restricted Japanese second-level spaces. The users are Japanese businesses together with the consumers, partners and institutions that interact with them online. The namespace's value lies in coherence and memorability: a Japanese-script domain matching the corporate designation audiences already recognize. Rather than guaranteeing status through registration-time gatekeeping, the Registry relies on ICANN's established rights-protection framework to address abusive or infringing registrations — the forum in which trademark and impersonation concerns are properly adjudicated. Consistent with this, the Registry also maintains a standard anti-abuse policy that operates purely reactively — acting on well-founded notifications of abuse or infringement and complying with applicable ICANN Consensus Policies — without any pre-registration restriction. Planned activities include: (i) a standard launch compliant with Specification 7, comprising a Sunrise period and Trademark Claims service via the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH); (ii) availability of the UDRP and Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS), giving clear, uniform recourse to resolve trademark conflicts after registration rather than through upstream filters; (iii) distribution through ICANN-accredited registrars with strong Japanese-market coverage; (iv) outreach to Japanese businesses and newly forming companies through incorporation-adjacent channels; and (v) premium positioning appropriate to a corporate-identity product. The purpose is sustainable because it rests on a renewal-driven, business-oriented model: businesses that adopt their corporate name as a domain exhibit high retention, and the addressable base — millions of existing Japanese companies plus a continuous flow of new incorporations and pre-incorporation reservations — is large, stable and continuously replenished. The applying entity is part of the Xserver group, a leading Japanese hosting provider whose infrastructure, distribution relationships and financial resources support long-term operation. All Critical Functions (DNS, DNSSEC, EPP, RDDS, Data Escrow) are provided by Identity Digital, an established, ICANN pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider. Second-level registrations support Japanese-script labels under the applicable IDN tables, ensuring the namespace is fully usable in the language of its users.