Creating a Safe and Vibrant Space on the Internet for New York City

May 27, 2009

Paul Cosgrave, Commissioner

Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications

via email

Dear Commissioner Cosgrave;

The .nyc TLD provides the opportunity for New York Cityto fashion the Internet to further its own local civic and global business opportunities.

Our long standing and carefully designed vision as presented in the enclosed RFI will allow NYC to take its place atop the Internet’s borderless state to provide preeminent connectivity, utility and security for residents, visitors and businesses.

Our wiki, blog, website and outreach efforts continue to ring valuable insight into the most advantageous methods for operating the .nyc TLD. We will periodically appraise you and other entities interested in .nyc’s developments.

Sincerely,

TL

Thomas Lowenhaupt

------

Thomas Lowenhaupt, Founder and Chair

Connecting.nyc Inc.

Jackson Hts., NYC 11372

718 639 4222

Web- Wiki - Blog

Comments in Response to the

Request for Information on the .nyc TLD

To the City of New York,

Department of Information and Telecommunications Technology

by Connecting.nyc, Inc.

May 27, 2009

1

Connecting.nyc Inc. & the .nyc TLD

Introduction - From Resolution to Reality

When Internet technology became a global force in the 1990's, it reduced the limitations of time and space and suggested that travel was no longer necessary to exchange ideas and to evaluate people and products. With broad acceptance of this notion the Net diminished the proximity advantage that cities have historically offered. As well, by scattering resident and organization websites over dozens of Top Level domains or TLDs - .com, .net, .gov, .org, .tv, etc. - the Net disconnected the community - there is no New York on the Internet. And most regrettably, many benefits the Internet's powerful capabilities can bring to the organization and operation of our city remain outside the realm of possibility without a .nyc TLD.

The .nyc TLD provides the opportunity to put the Internet to work addressinglocal issues and opportunities that are the blight and beauty of our lives. As well, it will enable New York City to positioning itself as a new Trusted Center of Global Commerce.

Success with these efforts dependson an education effort that persuades New Yorkers that the TLD is a foundation resource for their future; that it is worth the effort required by a learning curve, and that a moderate investment and the ongoing care like that which one provides to one’s home, will result in better lives for us all.

Connecting.nyc Inc. & the .nyc TLD

Connecting.nyc, Inc.’s founders trace their involvement with ICANN and city TLDs from 1998. The organization evolved from Queens Community Board 3's Internet Empowerment Resolution of April 2001 calling for .nyc’s acquisition and development in the public interest. While that Resolution hoped for a rapid acquisition, priorities in the city and at ICANN demanded otherwise.

In 2005, when it became apparent that a path toward the issuance of new TLDs was being cleared, a member of Community Board 3 reinvigorated the effort to bring .nyc home. With TLDs being virgin territory for cities, gaining support for the concept from existing entities proved difficult. To facilitate the Resolution’s implementation, in 2006 a small group of New Yorkers, determined to assure .nyc's acquisition and development in the public interest, took steps leading to the formation of the New York State not-for-profit Connecting.nyc Inc.

After years of advocacy by Connecting.nyc Inc. and others interested in creating a place for cities on the Internet, the ICANN adopted its New TLD Policy in June 2008, a policy that included cities as eligible applicants for TLDs. As a result, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, and other cities will apply to ICANN for their city TLDs in 2010 and begin using the Internet's Domain Name System to organize their resources to more effectively participate in our increasingly digital world.

From the beginning Connecting.nyc Inc.’s vision has been that the effective development and use of the Internet required remedial and ongoing education. That if chaos and disorder were to be avoided in developing the .nyc TLD, planning, education, and care were to be the criteria that would guide the city’s newest infrastructure.

In reviewing our responses to the RFI, note that we view the technical operation of the .nyc TLDs registry as the responsibility of contracted organization.Our role and goal is to create an operational and oversight structure that will provide the best technology for the residents and organizations of New York City and to establish a mechanism that will facilitate .nyc’s integration into the existing operation of our great city.

This RFI response is another chapter of our enduring commitment to educate ICANN, other countries and initiatives, business, and the public as to the need and benefits of city TLDs. We respectfully point to our website, blog, wiki for more insight as to our longstanding efforts and vision.

We are delighted that New York City has chosen to evaluate the introduction of the .nyc TLD as a tool for the City's development. Intelligent development will lead to very substantial income streams and result in a heightened measure of control of our City's presence and identity on the Net.

Over the years we've gathered a wealth of information about the operation of a city TLD. Some of that information is reflected in the following. Our wiki and blog contain the full body of our explorations.

In reading the following please note that we've presented options and opportunities rather than firm recommendations. Our intent has been to withhold conclusions and contractual entanglements pending the formal engagement of the city government. We welcome the beginning of that engagement with this RFI.

Responses to Request for Information

  • Suggested potential uses for the .nyc gTLD

Every day the globe shrinks as new social media connect us in previously unimagined ways, at home, the office, and increasingly while mobile. Video, text, voice, maps, documents, discussions, product and service information, invention, records, and plans are being digitized where feasible. But much digital information remains isolated in silos and walled gardens and is not shared over the Internet. The Internet's Domain Name System, or DNS,facilitates makingthis digital information findable within this swelling ocean.

Invented in the early 1980's, the DNS provides the naming structure - the .com, .org, .gov, .edu, .us, etc. – thatispart of the many websites we daily traverse. If intelligently managed, this naming structure provides insight into the nature of the information provided within. When we access a .gov site we understand that a government is responsible for the information provided. When on an .edu site we understand that it is under the pre-authenticated flag of an accredited educational institution.

The quality of the DNS varies though. A .org has significantly strayed from its original not-for-profit intent, as global registrants continue to secure those names for an array of purposes due to an open, un-authenticated namespace.

Presently New York City's resources for residents, visitors,and businesses are scattered over the web on .com, .org, .tv, and dozens of other TLDs. The .nyc TLD would serve to house much of that content, creating the necessary structure, organization, and innovation for the City – residents, businesses, government, not-for-profits, everyone- to grow and operate in this new technological age.

Because of the Internet's size and the limited effectiveness of the DNS, search engines have become the primary method for locating Internet resources - websites, documents, pictures... This puts the algorithms that control their operation in command of how New York City's resources are located by residents and visitors alike. New Yorknot only doesn’t have a place in the DNS, it is not in control of the signposts that lead to its disparate locations on the Internet.

We have the opportunity to change that with the arrival of the .nyc TLD.

The .nyc TLD will provide a clean slate for developing New York City's space on the Internet. It will enable New Yorkers to connect with one another and for the world to better locate our vast resources. It will provide a platform upon which we can better control our future while offering economic development and quality of life improvements.

A good domain name is typically short, descriptive, and memorable. The .nyc TLD will provide names for new businesses, names that capture a community need and connect like minded residents, names that facilitate civic discourse,and "portal" names that make the city's resources visible to the world.

On a fundamental level, the DNS is about providing names that make locating an Internet resource easier than remembering its technical address - nyc.gov rather than 161.185.30.156.

Economic Development
  • City Marketing / Tourism - The city can better market itself globally as a tourist destination and business market by setting aside and assuring the effective management of names such as hotels.nyc and tours.nyc. Effectively developed, the .nyc TLD will be a force to move the city from fourth place in the Anholt City Brands Index to first.
  • Small Business and Organizations - Local businesses and organizations will have access to short, descriptive and memorable domain names facilitating their networking needs. Today acquiring a good domain name has become a significant budget item. (See prices paid for recent sales of good .com names.)
  • Domain Name Revenue - Domain name registration fees will remain in the city.
  • Matching Global Competition - New York City will be better able to serve as a corporate headquarters city with competitors like Singapore (.sg) and Hong Kong (.hk), which received TLDs as nation-states, and .Paris, .Berlin and Barcelona (.bcn) which have announced TLD acquisition efforts.
Quality of Life
  • A MoreLivableCity- Daily life in the city will improve with an organized and intuitive Internet organizing and presenting city resources. For example, if searching for a school, people will trust their intuition and begin at schools.nyc.
  • Improved Community - Community memory and communication will be improved enabling residents to more easily locate and network with one another to identify issues and organize for their resolution.
  • Internet Access and Development - Connecting.nyc Inc.'s missionisto provide training and education about the .nyc TLD and the Internet. Funds raised through name sales and other revenue opportunities will be used to promote and provide Net services for all New Yorkers.
Features

When the Commissioners Plan of 1811 created Manhattan’s street grid, it organized and provided ready access to the city’s real estate resources to great economic gain. We see the .nyc TLD as the Planof 1811's digital parallel, as an organizing platform facilitating access to the city’s Internet resources. The key enabling features provided by the .nyc TLD include:

Good Domain Names – Names that are short, descriptive, and memorable.

Identity - Every .nyc domain name says "Made" or "From" New York City.

Intuitive Search

The .nyc Portals

Advantaged Search Engine Positioning

Trusted TLD

“Trademark” Benefits

A description of these features follows.

Intuitive Search

Today, intuition enables one to enter a Fortune 500 name - say IBM.com - into the address bar and expect a direct connection. But beyond a few giants, 99% of the time people are better off doing a Google search.

But as residents become aware of .nyc's intuitive design (and those of other city-TLDs), that will change. As educational efforts place .nyc into the consciousness of city residents they will begin trusting their instincts and try entering the name of a local restaurant or clothing store with a .nyc suffix and hope, and later expect, a direct connection.

With careful design, education, and time people will learn they can enter 75th-street.nyc and find very local news, or queensfoundations.nyc to locate a listing of foundations serving Queens. Today, you'll receive 1,670,000 Google hits for Queens foundations and will land you in a Kansas City brewery.

"Glocal"

A step beyond Intuitive Search is using local sites for global TLDs. For example, coke.nyc or nike.nyc will provide local job info, product distribution points, sponsored events, etc. The public will learn that these intuitive glocal (globally-local) sites provide the results they seek.

If an intuitive search landed on an unassigned domain name, .nyc could take you to a combination index and "WhoIs" page. There one might refine a search or take the opportunity to purchase an available domain name. This contrasts with today's .com world where a wrong guess frequently lands one in a domain of charlatans.

There’s no panacea with .nyc, but we will be dealing within a universe of 8,400,000 people living within 400 square miles, not 8,000,000,000 spread over the globe. Connecting.nyc Inc.'s recommended awareness and education efforts will guide the public to a more intuitive city.

The .nyc Portals

A key feature of the .nyc TLD will be its portal and helper pages.

  • Portal Pages - With names like schools.nyc, hotels.nyc, and parks.nyc, these pages will be set aside as search aides. Portal Page Guidelines will establish that alpha and geographical searches be facilitated on directory pages. Editorial and advertising content might also be found on portal pages, with advertising revenue shared between the page maintainer and .nyc, depending of policies that establish the .nyc TLD. The number of portal pages and the qualifications and responsibilities of their developers - yellow page operator, an industry group, or small businesses - has not yet been made. A Portal Page Management discussion onour wiki addresses the how, how many, and who of directory pages. And a Portal Page focuses on the elements that will ease navigating the.nyc TLD.
  • Helper Pages - Access to portal pages will be facilitated by various helper pages such as index.nyc, directory.nyc, portals.nyc, and help.nyc.

With these features one might enter bakeries.nyc (or bakery.nyc) and receive a portal page, providing alpha and geographic searches - via a clickable map. If unsure about a search term, one could enter a helper page and peruse an alpha listing of portal pages. In our multi-cultural city, these helper pages should include several languages with pétrisseuse, pétrisseur, panaderia, enfrente mixed in with English synonyms like pastry.

Advantaged Search Engine Positioning

Let’s imagine you try an intuitive entry or two for your local bakery and then look through index.nyc and still can’t find your favorite cruller. So you enter “bakeries New York City” in Google’s search field. What might you expect? Experts from Google and Yahoo have said that search requests which include ".nyc" will rank domains which have ".nyc" as their TLD much higher.Thus a search "east side bakery in Manhattan" will show higher in Google’s listing than or

Other advantages arise from this as good domain names, i.e., those that are short, descriptive, and memorable, will translate into "findable" on search engines.

Following this search engine logic, businesses will learn that if their domains are located within the .nyc domain will avoid competitors in the larger .com TLD.

Trusted TLD

Identifiable and Trustable is another substantial advantage that .nyc will offer. While not approaching the trust and security an FDIC label provides banks, a well managed TLD can provide a measure of comfort in these days of spam and scam. For example, think of the comfort one feels within a more managed TLD like .gov or .edu.

In contrast to open TLDs like .com, .net, and .org, the .nyc TLD should establish criteria for those seeking a .nyc domain and provide ongoing oversight. To qualify for a .nyc TLD, the policies for acquiring a .nyc name should require some form of presence or nexus in the city (discussed below).

Oversight should include processes that convince the public that websites operating under the .nyc umbrella are accountable. At the same time provision should be made to enable residents and businesses to launch rapidly, to facilitate proposing new ideas, and to provide breathing room that enables the First Amendment to live within the .nyc TLD, with new names subject to post review and rapid take down processes for names that violate community standards.

Local “Trademark”