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Roland,<br>
<br>
Great that you bring up the example of Cambridge as it provides the
opportunity for me to mention the April 8 presentation I'm making at
the Planning Tech Conference in Cambridge (US) entitled "City-TLDs
as Urban Infrastructure" -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://web.mit.edu/rgoodspe/www/planningtech/">http://web.mit.edu/rgoodspe/www/planningtech/</a>. It provides the
opportunity for me to imagine the question being thrown at me and to
here begin to prepare my response:<br>
<br>
First. Is this a situation where every conceivable instance must be
resolved before moving forward? I see too many opportunities wasted
by awaiting final answers to every conceivable problem. The
complexity of cities (big cities with say a million or more people,
and there are less than 500 of these) require a TLD to address the
breadth of issues they face. If cities are the hope for a
sustainable planet (or anything remotely near that), why are we
putting them on the same plane with .shop? How damaging is it that
we can't find and talk to one another is cities? What's the cost in
quality-of-life that our decision making processes don't have access
to the full realm of Internet resources, resulting in a digital
diaspora?<br>
<br>
Second. So Paris, Texas is in contention with Paris? No way. One is
Paris, Texas and the other is Paris.<br>
<br>
Third. Where there are no clear "winners" one might hope that a
"play nice or you can't play" reminder would suffice. And I think a
U/X designer could come up with a reasonable framework in about 10
minutes - e.g., blue borders are UK Cambridge sites, green border
are US Cambridge. <br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Tom Lowenhaupt<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 2/24/2011 5:14 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:MWtaX+0$9iZNFA3C@internetpolicyagency.com"
type="cite">In message <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:4D6589D7.40400@communisphere.com"><4D6589D7.40400@communisphere.com></a>,
at 17:27:35 on Wed, 23 Feb 2011, Thomas Lowenhaupt
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:toml@communisphere.com"><toml@communisphere.com></a> writes
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">1. Both city-TLDs and linguistic/cultural
TLDs are long overdue. Had the Net's inventors known the scope
the Net would take, they'd certainly have taken greater care in
issuing a more robust DNS taxonomy. But with cities being the
hope for a sustainable future (if you believe in that sort of
stuff) I suggest they get first priority
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Issues with the DNS taxonomy have been evident for a very long
time (it was one of the things some colleagues and I struggled
with when we set up an ISP in 1994).
<br>
<br>
But adding on extra layer only solves some of the problems,
because even for cities there are duplicates (eg "Lincoln" is a
regional capital in both UK and USA, "Cambridge" is a well known
University and regional capital in the UK, as well as a university
town in USA).
<br>
</blockquote>
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