.sec

The mission of Security Matters as a nonprofit organization is to empower human rights defenders to stay safe and resilient while driving social change. The .sec gTLD is intended to be an open general-purpose domain. While Security Matters is focused on digital security, we believe in an open .sec TLD because the word “sec”, besides its meaning for security, can be meaningfully used for other purposes as well, for example secretariat functions (e.g. company.sec), denoting the concept of second as a short time or the next, as well as being an abbreviation for: sector, section, sect, secular, etc. As a gTLD, the .sec domain intends to be open for registration from any individual, organization, community group, network or initiative. Given the generic nature and diverse meaning of the shortform “sec”, we do not believe that an average user would mistake domains under the gTLD to be more secure or confer more trust than for example a .com domain. We also observe that S.E.C. (in which case usually read as /ˈɛs ˈiː sˈiː/ instead of /sˈɛk/ as a word) is used by the United States and Philippines for their respective Securities and Exchange Commission, however besides the 2 countries, we are not aware of many other countries using the short form S.E.C. for their respective departments for the purpose. Furthermore, both countries have well established online presence for their respective departments, www.sec.gov for the US and www.sec.gov.ph for the Philippines, therefore, it is unlikely that an average user would mistake .sec to be related to those functions, or that a domain under .sec represents that the domain registrant has obtained particular licenses. Nevertheless, as a preventative measure we will propose to include Safeguard Public Interest Commitments to caution registrants of .sec domains against misleading the public. In particular we will propose to include Safeguard PICs 1-8. See responses to Q170 & Q171.