John,
 
I. The very long answer to your question is presented in Towards city-TLDs in the Public Interest, a paper I wrote with the able help of Michael Gurstein. It's 13 single spaced pages present much of our case in great detail.
 
2. The Internet Empowerment Resolution, from which the .nyc effort emerged, was meant to address the need of residents in our immigrant community for good domain names - short, descriptive, and memorable. Many of them were not here (or just children) in 1995 when the good names were available. And even then, they didn't provide the identity that a streetclothes.nyc name provides. Good names with identity. Why not?
 
3. Enter "good hotels in New York City" into google. I just got 11,400,000 responses. Perhaps it would serve our city's interest (as well as hotel owners, workers, suppliers, guests) to have our 402 hotels (how many times does 402 go into 11,400,000?) presented in a more orderly and favorable way in www.hotels.nyc. (Note, we're not proposing that google go away, only that we have a small space to present our resources.) You don't like www.hotels.nyc? go to google or yahoo.
 
But the "Towards" paper answers your question in an orderly and reasoned way, presenting the case for a public interest TLD. I hope you have the opportunity to read it.
 
Sincerely,
 
Tom Lowenhaupt
 
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: "Evan Leibovitch" <evan@telly.org>
Cc: "NA Discuss" <na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 1:20 AM
Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] Help create the .nyc Internet space for New York and New Yorkers

>> As an example, I'd like to know -- specifically -- what could be
>> accomplished by .nyc that could not be done using .nyc.us . Of course,
>> ".nyc.us" is already owned by a squatter, which means...
>
>  ... that .nyc.ny.us is ready for anyone who wants to use it, and has been
> for several decades.  There's also new-york.ny.us, managed by a legacy
> registrar in Indiana.
>
> I don't bear any particular ill will toward people who want .nyc or
> .berlin, but I don't see any particular need for or interest in them,
> either.
>
> R's,
> Geography boy, aka
johnl@trumansburg.ny.us
>
>
> ------
> NA-Discuss mailing list
>
NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org
> http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss_atlarge-lists.icann.org
> Visit the NA-RALO Wiki at https://st.icann.org/naralo/
> ------
>