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­ ­­ ­Good Names for a Great City

How Many .nyc Names?

First Draft: ­­City of New York 
Reserved Names

Developing a Domain Name Allocation Plan that is fair to all interests requires difficult choices. But there is a growing body of experien­ce to draw upon, e.g., the methodology used by the .eu and .asia TLDs; and the FCC's experiences with "community standards." Ultimately of course, we will be guided in deciding the appropriate role for our city's TLD by the values of the New York City community. Here's an example of the tough choices we face.

Which Good?

Think about a name such as music.nyc. Under our not-for-profit, public interest operation, there are two evident allocation alternatives:

• Sell It - Hold an auction with the revenue from the high bidder going into civic education; or
  
• Community Evaluation - We might develop guidelines for identifying the public interest and deciding which names, such as music.nyc, to set aside to further the development of important  communities. These are of at least two types, historic geographic communities such as Astoria and Soho, and communities of interest: music, news, shoes.... So we might conclude that music.nyc would be best developed by the city's music community and offer Astoria.nyc to the highest bidder. See the Rugby vs. Rugby page for a discussion on this.
  

Name Categories Under the .nyc TLD

An ontology and taxonomy for different types of relationships and names is an important early step in identifying name distribution policies. One view sees different "bands": trademark, local trademark, exclusive, shared, community...

An early question arises as to what are appropriate community or public interest names? What process do we use to identify "civic" and "public interest" domain names. Some seem obvious: gov.nyc, mayor.nyc, and council.nyc for government; for the tourism industry, hotels.nyc; and for the general public names like www.directory.nyc and www.index.nyc.

Names Reserved as per ICANN Contract

We will comport with ICANN recommendations on reserved names for technical and public policy reasons. The ICANN will likely require that the following second level names be reserved: 0, 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, AFRINIC, APNIC, ARIN, ASO, b, c, ccNSO, d, e, Example, f, g, GNSO, gtld-servers, h, i, IAB, IANA, iana-servers, ICANN, IESG, IETF, Internic, IRTF, ISTF, j, k, l, LACNIC, LATNIC, m, n, NIC*, o, p, q, r, rfc-editor, RIPE, root-servers, s, t, test, u, v, w, Whois*, www*, x, y, z.. The * names are reserved for use by registry operators only.

Names Reserved to Facilitate the Operation of the .nyc TLD

• index.nyc
• portal.nyc
• help.nyc
• connecting.nyc

Names Reserved for Intellectual Property Holders

"Sunrise" periods provide existing trademark and other intellectual property (IP) holders with the opportunity to reserve names in the .nyc space.

• Trademark Sunrise Period - National and international trademark holders might seek names such as: www.siemens.nyc, www.hyatt.nyc, www.porsche.nyc, www.lufthansa.nyc, www.ebay.nyc, www.google.nyc, www.newyorkpost.nyc, www.ibm.nyc, www.nytimes.nyc, www.coke.nyc. Traditionally a 1-2 month period is set aside for such trademark holders.

• Local Sunrise Period - We are considering having NYC based companies and organizations provided with the opportunity to reserve familiar names such as www.cuny.nyc, www.nypl.nyc, www.nyu.nyc, and www.queenscollege.nyc.
  

Names Reserved for Future Use

How do we reserve names for future generations? A vexing problem. Year names provide a good example of name set-asides: 2010.nyc, 2011.nyc, 2012.nyc, etc. What other names should be set aside for future use?

Names Held in Trust for Local New York City Government Units

The .nyc TLD will facilitate the interaction and operation of city governance and service delivery with institutions, residents, community organizations, and businesses. Intuitive URLs like council.nyc, mayor.nyc, and police.nyc will make a city’s resources readily available and easier to locate. As well, city government can develop micro sites like parkingregs.gov.nyc and cityholidays.gov.nyc.

• gov.nyc (as redirect, mirror, or home (if the USA is forced to abandon its use of .gov) for New York City's government website.
  

• police.nyc

• NYPD.nyc
  
• fire.nyc
  

• 911.nyc

• council.nyc

• mayor.nyc

• copic.nyc

• 311.nyc

• 211.nyc

• The cb##.borough.gov.nyc (currently used is cb##.borough.nyc.gov) series for the city's 59 community boards.
  

On June 9, 2008, Connecting.nyc volunteers reached out to public employees through our "Names for a Livable City" effort. On June 29, 2009, speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum, Mayor Bloomberg suggested using data.nyc for the NYC Apps initiative. It sounds like the mayor has been reading our wiki.

Civic Names

See the Civic Names page and the set-aside project. 

Traditional Neighborhood Names- dotNeighborhoods

New York is a city of neighborhoods. Criteria are being developed for distributing these dotNeighborhood Names.

Internet of Things

Soon there will be an Internet domain name for every object in the public sphere, every billboard, building, database, fire hydrant, park, street, tree...This "Internet of Things" is empowered by a technology called the "Semantic Web." See how the .nyc TLD can facilitate the identification, networking, and development of the coming Internet, perhaps more appropriately, City of Things. Learn more here.

Business Improvement Districts

Business Improvement Districts provide local property owners and merchants with the power to manage their environment through a form of local taxation. Good domain names can help their operation.

Names Set Aside for Auction

Auctioning names provide a rich opportunity to raise funds and diminish name hoarding. See The Economic Case for Auctions in New TLDs, an August 2008 paper published by ICANN and its "auction partner" PowerAuctions LLC.

In the instance of the .asia TLD, those indicating an interest in the same domain name as of a specified closing date were entered into a high bidder electronic auction. Possibilities for name auctions include:

• nouns.nyc (other than portal selections)
  

Geographic Names

Some geographic names are legal entities. Others are real estate names coined to sell property in specific geographic areas. New York City has hundreds of these "neighborhoods." Some have value.

• Boroughs: queens.nyc, manhattan.nyc, brooklyn.nyc (kings.county.ny.us), bronx.nyc, thebronx.nyc, staten-island.nyc
  
• Neighborhoods: jackson-heights.nyc, astoria.nyc, greenwich-village.nyc, uppereastside.nyc, upper-east-side.nyc, bensonhurst.nyc.
• Park Names: central-park.nyc, centralpark.nyc

Portal Pages

See the discussion about the portals and portal pages. Possible portal pages include: www.hotels.nyc | www.pharmacys.nyc | www.real-estate.nyc | www.hairdressers.nyc  | www.craftsmen.nyc | www.yellowpages.nyc  | fashion.nyc

Names for Auction

• sports.nyc, news.nyc and names of this sort have no obvious "owners" with prior claim on them. They can be auctioned early on to fund the start-up efforts or later to raise larger funds for our education efforts.

• com.nyc - Using TLDs as second level domains is currently prohibited by ICANN. As there are intuitive and taxonomic benefits from such usages, we will petition for their use. If successful, these "TLD" names will be made available.
  

• a.nyc, b.nyc, c.nyc..., 1.nyc, 2.nyc... - Issuing single character, second level domain names ( 1, 2, 3... and a, b, c...) is currently prohibited by ICANN. This policy is under review by the ICANN and should it change, we would place these up for auction.

Disambiguation Pages­

While not frequently encountered on the web, disambiguation offers one means for resolving disputes over names. It is the process of resolving ambiguity when a single name can be associated with more than one entity. In many cases, this word or phrase is the same natural title of more than one organization. In other words, disambiguations are paths leading to different domain pages that share essentially the same characters in their title. Apple Records and Apple Computer provide a classic example of an early conflict over the www.apple.com domain name.

Names to Facilitate International Travel

On November 14, 2007 Connecting.nyc participated on a Broadening the Domain Name Space: Adding TLDs for Cities and Regions panel at the U.N. sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio De Janeiro. Panelist Sebastian Bacholet, appearing on behalf of the .paris TLD, previewed the internationalization study initiated by developers of the .nyc, .berlin, and .paris TLDs at the ICANN Los Angeles meeting. He provided three instances where second level domain names might be developed in various languages - www.taxi.nyc, www.hotels.paris, and www.hospital.berlin. By way of example, he explained that when in need of health care, German or French speaking visitors to New York City might enter www.krankenhaus.nyc or www.hôpital.nyc in their respective languages and receive pages with the needed, in some instances vital, information. We are continuing a dialog on this innovation.

It is expected that we will develop a pool of civic names for use on a temporary basis, for example, www.SaveTheTree.nyc might facilitate civic goals of many different projects.

Undesirable Names

This is an area of great sensitivity for many people. Four letter words are frequently the first to draw children to search a dictionary. What policy is appropriate for these words? What about their counterparts in foreign languages? A study of the FCC's community standards might provide a start on this and George Carlin's 7 dirty words. Others have suggested caution around certain words with a sexual connotation.

Hording / Speculation / Typosquatting / Name Clouds

• What lessons are to be learned from the .com, .biz, and .eu experiences?

• For an excellent article on name clouds, see Bret Fausett's article on the Namesbriefs blog.
  
• See report on typosquatting: http://us.mcafee.com/root/identitytheft.asp?id=safe_typo&cid=38296.
  

Dispute Resolution

A Dispute Resolution Policy refers to the mechanism for resolving competitive requests for domain names. See the following for DRP examples.

• .eu
• .com
  
• .asia
  

Guidelines for our DRP might also be guided by various "Laws of the Internet" (see sidebar). See this Wikipedia entry as a primer.

See the Rugby vs. Rugby discussion for a discussion of "sector contention."

Nexus

Connecting.nyc will limit those who can purchase a .nyc domain to those with a New York City nexus. The criteria for establishing nexus might include property ownership, business license, tax payer, voter registration. Singapore has a minimum nexus requirement of a postal box. For examples of nexus requirements see:

• Singapore's Domain Name Registration Agreement
• The .us Nexus Requirement - http://www.neustar.us/policies/docs/ustld_nexus_requirements.pdf
  
• The .asia Nexus - http://www.dotasia.org/draft/DotAsia-Charter-Eligibility--FINALDRAFT-v-1-5.pdf
• The .cat (Catalonia) Nexus - http://www.domini.cat/media/upload/arxius/charter.pdf

Most knowledgeable people indicate that there's a slippery slope here that will inevitable lead to something as open as the .com TLD. We hope "most knowledgeable people" are wrong in this instance.

Miscellany

• Proximity - Geographic locations are an important element of the .nyc TLD's intuitive design. See the "namespace and GIS" page for other geographic relationships.
• DNS - Is it possible to present this wiki process within an existing domain name server?
  

Relevant Links

• Ebay's takedown process.
  

• The Economic Case for Auctions in New TLDs - A paper published by ICANN and its "auction partner" PowerAuctions LLC.
  
• Who owns Hillary? - A proposal for more trademark-like protections for political names. See this SSRN paper.
  

• The .eu Domain Name Distribution Process
• First-Come First-Served Paper
• The Perfect Sunrise? - A booklet on designing a sunrise period by the IPC. 

• History of the DNS in a Thousand Emails 
  

Key .nyc Pages

• The .nyc Wiki Home Page 
• Cyber Land-Use Plan
  
• The Portals
  

• Portal Page Development
  

• Portal Page Content Guidelines
  
• Ten Names You Don't Want To See Within .nyc  (a fun page)
  
• The Operating Environment
• The Development Environment
• Connectingnyc Inc.'s Home Page
• Our Blog