Evan, Your concerns are heart warming. New York City might be headed off a cliff with its application. The "public hearing" Joly announced about a NeuStar ~ New York City arrangement concerned a contract that is incomplete and therefore not available to the public - see http://blog.connectingnyc.org (don't care about the issue - see my friends BloomBORG for a giggle). Moving forward, I hope to find segments of the Internet community that will join me in developing a plan / guidelines that will assist cities navigating the shark infested registry-registrar waters, creating best practices, and effectively governing their TLDs. I'll be announcing that early next week. In the meantime, in preparing my comments for the faux-public hearing <http://www.coactivate.org/projects/campaign-for.nyc/comments-to-doitt-on-pro...>, I'm getting closer to answering your "What's so important about city-TLDs?" question. It might be too late to help my home city, and I'm not 100% there yet, but I hope the below begins to turn up the volume so that people will begin to hear the music to which I dance. Best, Tom Lowenhaupt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From my comments to the faux-hearing <http://www.coactivate.org/projects/campaign-for.nyc/comments-to-doitt-on-pro...>: What is a City-TLD? 3 Views * Let's think back to the early 1800's when work began on what's now called the Commissioners Plan of 1811. The Plan set out the city's street grid - 1st to 155th Streets and 1st to 12th Avenues. It took 4 years and even then they left out a few parts – like Central Park. And late in the process they said “Let's put in Lexington Avenue.” Not by name mind you – but conceptually. The Commissioners' Plan wasn't about names. And this city-TLD is not, in its essence, about names. Names are part of both. But the core elements are structure, order, and accountability. * My view is that a .nyc is a scaffold for our culture and our treasures. Think for a second about the New York Yankees. Yes, all the star players have names. But its the combination of players, coaches, trainers, owners, fans, and concessionaires selling hotdogs and beer that make the New York Yankees a success. Each and every person in this list of what might be called the “Yankees Network” has a name. But it's an effective organizational structure and culture that makes the Yankees win. From my perspective our city's TLD is a culture making tool. A scaffold for organizing our resources. * Let me tell you another view, one I'll call The Grand View (I'm thankful to David Bollier's /Viral Spiral/ <http://bollier.org/> for this.) – It involves the legendary Adam Smith. Everyone is familiar with the impact of his /The Wealth of Nations. /To some this 1776 economics treaties is their constitution and bible. In it Smith wrote about people's penchant for what he called “truck, barter, and exchange” - markets and capitalism. Today his thoughts serve as a basis for our global economy. In another work, /The Theory of Moral Sentiments, /Smith wrote about “deep impulses of human sympathy and morality” that included the most important of human traits – sharing, loving, caring, sympathy, empathy. The Grand View holds that the .nyc TLD is a organizing force for digitizing these most important human impulses. At first glance, to an old timer like me, this sounded like crazy talk. But when I look at developments like Wikipedia and the Open Source movement, I see Smith's “deep impulses of human sympathy and morality” played out on a daily basis. Projects like these are all about people sharing to help one another. So 250 years later Adam Smith's sympathetic half may reach fruition through Internet resources like the .nyc TLD. Because now we have a tool to more effectively identify, count, track, and value the good. Imagine our city with a 1,000 Wikipedia scale projects. Efforts like: * JacksonHeights.nyc * GreenwichVillage.nyc * Harlem.nyc * Voters.nyc * CivicIssues.nyc * CandidatesForMayor.nyc So what's a city-TLD? It's a powerful planning and organizing tool that can improve our city and our lives during the foreseeable future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On 3/22/2012 4:45 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
On 22 March 2012 15:10, Joly MacFie<joly@punkcast.com> wrote:
A public hearing on NYC's allocation of the .nyc contract to Neustar will be held tomorrow, Friday, in Brooklyn.
Looks like all of Thomas Lowenhaupt's multiple years of hard work advocating for a community-focused .nyc TLD for may turn out to have been blazing a rugged, obstacle-clearing trail through which Neustar may now drive its HumVee.
Thomas, I feel for ya. I was a vocal skeptic of your proposal but am even more critical of a direct government-Neustar registry (both in process and likely substance). I didn't expect that your project would seek out defensive domains but I can feel fairly confident that a pure generic play would consider defencives as part of their revenue mix.
Personally, I've delighted that so few geoTLD proposals have come from North America. I expect .québec for historical reasons (much conceptually in common with .cat), and I consider the current plays for .nyc and .vegas to be almost defensive TLDs themselves, given those cities' own branding efforts.. The other two listed at http://www.citytld.com/ (for Ottawa and San Francisco) appear dead
Most of the others are proposed for Europe. What a massive waste of money and time. I feel truly sorry for all the small businesses that will be compelled to register defensively for those that roll out.
Maybe there are so few North American ones because people here already see what a bust ".us" is and figure that almost all the incumbents are Amercian anyway. But I'll appreciate the sanity wherever I can find it.
- Evan
*Information Technology and Telecommunications Public Hearing*
Notice is hereby given that a Contract Public Hearing will be held on Friday, March 23, 2012 at DoITT, 2 MetroTech Center, 4th Floor, Brooklyn NY 11209, commencing at 2:00 P.M. on the following:
In the matter of a proposed contract between the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and Neustar located at 21575 Ridgetop Circle, Sterling, VA 20166, to apply for, and if obtained, operate, administer, manage and market nyc. The term of the contract shall be for five (5) years with two (2) five (5) year renewal options at the City’s discretion. The contract is a Revenue contract, PIN: 85812P0001.
*10/5/2009 City issues RFP for .nyc management<http://isoc-ny.org/?p=902>
* *
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