[governance] A workable, gTLDs process, now

[Thomas Lowenhaupt]

Roland,

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" - http://web.mit.edu/rgoodspe/www/planningtech/. It 
provides the opportunity for me to imagine the question being thrown at 
me and to here begin to prepare my response:

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?

Second. So Paris, Texas is in contention with Paris? No way. One is 
Paris, Texas and the other is Paris.

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.

Best,

Tom Lowenhaupt



On 2/24/2011 5:14 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <4D6589D7.40400 at communisphere.com>, at 17:27:35 on Wed, 23 
> Feb 2011, Thomas Lowenhaupt <toml at communisphere.com> writes
>
>> 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
>
> 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).
>
> 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).
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