ICANN recently green-lighted TLDs for geographical regions (.eu and .asia, as well as .cat, established to promote the culture of the Catalonia region of Spain).
"Cities are the next logical step," said Krischenowski, who added that .berlin is just "the tip of the iceberg." (A similar effort is under way in New York, to create .nyc.)And, of course, there is .la, bought by some Los Angeles entrepreneurs from Laos, but that already existed, so it doesn't count.
I wonder how fine-grained the allocation of domains will be; I imagine that, not long after .london and .nyc are allocated, someone will want things like .northlondon and .brooklyn. (Then again, perhaps London will get a bunch of postcode domains, with trendy Islington eateries getting .n1 domains and such.)
Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/ | Sat Dec 17 12:22:44 2005
It's not much worse than for cities. Berlin, by rights, should have .berlin.de if anything, and New York could have .nyc.us. One could argue that Berlin and New York are sufficiently iconic to get TLDs, but where does one draw the line? .barcelona? .sydney? .brighton? Any American city that has had a Tom Hanks movie set in it? Or whatever city anyone with connections to ICANN wants to hype up?
Posted by: toby | http:// | Sat Dec 17 22:21:40 2005
Another TLD whinge. America needs a ccTLD, and every new US registration needs to happen under it. Old ones need to be migrated to it.
Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/ | Sun Dec 18 01:10:51 2005
Tell that to Dick Cheney. America has de facto ownership of .com/.org/.net (and outright ownership of .gov and .mil) because (a) it built the goddamn internet, and/or (b) it can do what it likes with it.
Posted by: Levi Pinkus | http:// | Thu Dec 22 02:11:01 2005
That could be tricky with some cities worlwide that have the same name - Melbourne springs to mind, not to mention US cities with biblical or European names (Memphis, Paris, scores of Jerusalems and Salems etc.)
Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/ | Thu Dec 22 09:19:05 2005
Well, of course, if a .paris was granted, it'd be given to the French one not the Texan one. Unless, of course, the 'Merkins were really pissed off at the cheese-eatin'-surrender-monkeys about something.
Whether, for example, the canonical Birmingham would be the one in England or Alabama, or Cambridge would be the English university town or the Massachusetts one (home to MIT and a lot of pioneering computer science research) could be a thornier issue.
Which is probably why top level city domains are a stupid idea. By all means, have them under countries, but is it really worth the bother to save having to put a '.de' at the end of 'berlin'?
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Posted by: toby | http:// | Sat Dec 17 03:22:24 2005
TLDs for individual UK postcodes. What a stellar idea! Hierarchy be damned!