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

[Roland Perry]

In message <059c01cad949$e55874e0$7800a8c0 at powuseren2ihcx>, at 03:37:49 
on Sun, 11 Apr 2010, Thomas Lowenhaupt <toml at communisphere.com> writes
>Roland,
> 
>Here's something I wrote a while ago that sought to put the Net (and
>ICANN) into an historic perspective with regard to cities.
>  Imagine that in 1983 Vint Cerf had visited a global city like New
>  York, climbed the steps to City Hall and said to Mayor Koch that he
>  and Jon Postel had begun thinking about an Internet enhancement that
>  would make it easier to find the cities digital resources. That they
>  were thinking of calling it the Domain Name System (DNS) and using
>  names such as .com, .org and .edu.
>
>  And imagine Vint explaining his vision about this new technology's
>  prospect for addressing the multiplicity of city needs; concluding
>  with a plea that the mayor gather the world's smartest minds in New
>  York City, help detail a desired DNS's feature-set and in the
>  process develop a model that other cities might follow.
>
>  But as we all know, no one knocked on that City Hall door and the
>  DNS was created without considering its impact on cities. And when
>  it escaped from the lab, the technology spread like a virus and
>  changed the world for better and for worse.
>
>  Remarkably, the DNS opportunity is again at hand. ICANN will deliver
>  on its key mission in 2010 and we'll soon see cities sporting new
>  TLDs such as .nyc, .berlin, and .paris.

But a single layer of name like that might not fully address the issue 
of collisions.

>Let me note that this was not written with the intent of criticizing these Internet pioneers, merely to highlight an area where, with
>omnipotent 20/20 hindsight, one might observe Net imperfections needing
>attention.

It's an issue that pervades the DNS, of course, even down to email 
user-names (if you can call that part of the DNS), and something which 
I've pondered over some 20 years now. If there's a neat way for Paris, 
France and Paris, Texas (I deliberately didn't use them as an example 
earlier, but now you've mentioned them...) to co-exist at the tld level, 
now's the time to suggest it.

>Roland, with all due respect, I've never heard ICANN dealing with any
>of the issues I've proposed for the IGF Workshop. 

What do you mean by "deal with"? And to some extent, what do you mean by 
"ICANN". The organisation has facilitated sessions for independent 
groups of people to discuss the specific issues (as well as general 
things like potential best practice for any kind of registry and 
registrar), and the GAC has gone into geographic names in some detail. I 
expect there's something about it in the DAG (but I haven't looked 
recently). I don't think it's all over yet, either.

>Yes, they have encouraged the development of "Perfect Sunrise" 
>guidelines that warrant consideration, and they uncovered that there's 
>a Paris in France as well as Texas. And to its credit, ICANN has agreed 
>that cities should have access to TLDs. But city-TLD governance, best 
>practices, and a primer for city-TLDs - it's just not in their scope.

I'd hope that something could be learnt, by City-tlds, from the work 
that's been done on abusive registrations, dispute resolution, and 
registry/registrar separation too. (You did ask for suggestions).

>ICANN's concern is commerce not cities. 

I'm not sure what you mean by "ICANN" here.

>City-TLDs are (IMHO) perfect for an IGF workshop.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do one.

Roland.

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Roland Perry" <roland at internetpolicyagency.com>
>To: <governance at lists.cpsr.org>
>Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2010 2:15 AM
>Subject: Re: [governance] Workshop Proposal for Vilnius - City-TLDs:
>Impact, Best Practices, Governance
>
>...
>
>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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-- 
Roland Perry
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