.sns

The mission of .sns is to give a social presence an address that its owner controls. The string is the established abbreviation for ""social networking service"" - the services through which people and organisations publish to, and are followed by, an audience. It is the standard term for them across the major Asian markets and is used elsewhere. It is applied for and will be operated in that plain descriptive sense, as an open namespace. Registrants fall into two groups. The first is everyone who maintains an audience across several services and wants one address that gathers it: independent creators, writers and bloggers, podcasters and musicians, artists and photographers, small and independent media, community organisers, associations, and businesses running an audience channel alongside their commercial site. The second is the ecosystem serving them: operators of social and community platforms, developers of clients, tools and integrations, agencies and community managers acting for others, and vendors of scheduling and analytics tools. Users are audiences and customers trying to reach the right account. A social presence is scattered by construction. It sits across several services, each of which owns the relationship, sets the terms, and may change or withdraw them. The link printed on a card or spoken at the end of a video points at a platform rather than at the person behind it, and when a platform declines or a name is lost there, the audience has to be reacquired. A domain the owner controls is the durable part of that chain. name.sns is short, says what it leads to, and can be re-pointed as services rise and fall without the audience noticing. The TLD is a descriptive namespace, not a register of verified or official accounts. The registry performs no verification and makes no representation that a registrant is the person or organisation whose name appears in a domain, or that any account reached through the TLD is authentic; this will be stated in the published registration policy and on the registry website. Rights are protected through the Sunrise and Trademark Claims periods required by Specification 7, and through the UDRP and URS thereafter. General Availability will be open, with no eligibility restrictions and no reservation of the namespace to the applying entity or its affiliates. Distribution will be through ICANN-accredited registrars on published, non-discriminatory terms consistent with Specification 9, including any registrar affiliated with the applying entity, which will receive the same terms as every other. Technical operation is contracted to a pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider, and abuse mitigation follows the Mandatory Public Interest Commitments and the DNS abuse obligations of the Base Registry Agreement, with a published abuse point of contact. The purpose is sustainable because the underlying behaviour outlasts the services that host it: audiences subscribe and publishers seek subscribers, through several successive generations of platform. An address of this kind is published where it is expensive to revise - printed material, third-party profiles, video descriptions already distributed - so letting it lapse breaks the audience relationship it exists to protect, and renewal is the ordinary outcome. The abbreviation is tied to no single platform, so the namespace neither depends on the fortunes of one service nor becomes obsolete when one declines. The applying entity belongs to an established hosting group with a direct channel to the registrants concerned, so awareness does not rest on paid acquisition alone. Registry operations are contracted to a pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider under a signed agreement, so the obligations of the Registry Agreement are met throughout ramp-up without depending on registration revenue alone.