[governance] Workshop Proposal for Vilnius - City-TLDs: Impact, Best Practices, Governance

[Roland Perry]

In message <055c01cad927$13225710$7800a8c0 at powuseren2ihcx>, at 23:28:36 
on Sat, 10 Apr 2010, Thomas Lowenhaupt <toml at communisphere.com> writes
>Having spent a decade working toward the time when TLDs would become
>available to cities, and with the time of their arrival (possibly) at
>hand, little guidance has been made available to those interested in
>developing TLDs that serve the interest of city residents and
>organizations. I'd like to draw on the wisdom of the list in
>formulating a proposal on city-TLD best practices and governance for
>the IGF's Vilnius Conference. I think the recent McTim thread
>"privatizing cc TLDs" primed the discussion on this issue.
> 
>Below is a draft of an IGF proposal for Vilnius. Comments appreciated.
> 
>Tom Lowenhaupt
> 
>Title: City-TLD Best Practices and Governance
>
>Objective: Cities have scant precedent and little guidance to draw upon
>on the features and applications of their "soon to be available" TLDs.
>This workshop will explore that lacuna looking at four areas: 1. It
>will present relevant experiences from country code and sponsored TLDs,
>highlighting successful domain name allocation practices; 2. It will
>propose a mechanism for engaging expertise from a variety of
>disciplines, e.g., software engineering, city planning, sociology,
>economics, and political science, to prepare a primer for developing
>these critical Internet resources; 3. It will explore structures for
>sharing best practices; 4. Finally, it will explore governance options
>for city-TLDs.
>
>Format: The workshop will begin with a 10 minute history of city TLDs,
>their status, and an introduction of the panelists. Followed by a 15
>minute introduction of successful development experiences from country
>code and sponsored TLDs; 15 minutes reviewing processes for identifying
>and engaging discipline experts in a the preparation of a city-TLD
>primer; 15 minutes to explore structures for best practice sharing; and
>15 minutes to identify city-TLD governance structures; followed by 50
>minutes for comments and questions from workshop participants.

It sounds interesting, but if (and this is a serious IGF Governance 
point) the IGF is supposed to be non-duplicative, then the discussion 
above would normally be an extremely close fit with an ICANN meeting. 
Indeed I have sat through a couple of very similar sessions there.

If you consider going ahead at the IGF, you might want to include a 
discussion of how you handle the sunrise period (there are several 
different models been tried out in the past) as this is possibly the 
most challenging aspect[1].

But that's only after you've successfully got your City-tld. The part 
which fascinates me the most (just a personal interest of course, I have 
long collected interesting telephone numbers, car licence plates, and 
yes even domain names) is how competing claims will be assessed.

For example, the City of Perry with the best Google ranking is in 
Georgia[2], USA, closely followed by others in Michigan, Utah, Oklahoma 
and Florida. Which would have the "best claim"?

[1] For example, what would it take for Air Berlin not to be a shoe-in 
for air.berlin, and would a decision like that be based on the prior 
registration of trademarks, a community policy, or something else (first 
to apply, winner of an auction, etc)?

[2] With three different domain names already: perry-ga.gov, perryga.com 
and perry.georgia.gov, so maybe they won't want a fourth.
-- 
Roland Perry
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