GeoTLDs - Case Studies
There a lots of silly, inaedequate or undesirable application cases for new TLDs imaginable. But nearly all the cases have one thing in common which will make these application scenarios unlikely: The TLD applications will not meet the basic ICANN criteria to run a TLD. These criteria are realistic business, financial, technical, and operational plans and a sound analysis of market needs. In contrast the hypothetical example cases the authors invented should show which application cases and problems are likely and realistically to emerge in the future.
[edit] Clear cases in which a GeoTLD should be approved
[edit] .london
London is the capital city of England and of the United Kingdom, and is the most populous city in the European Union. An important settlement for nearly two millennia, London is an international leader in finance, and its involvement in politics, education, entertainment, fashion, media and the arts contribute to its status as a World City. London has an estimated population of 7.5 million and a metropolitan area population of between 12 and 14 million. Its inhabitants are very cosmopolitan, drawing from a diverse range of peoples, cultures and religions, speaking over 300 different languages and come from a broad range of geographic and ethnic backgrounds. Wikipedia defines the members of the London community, the Londoners, as people who inhabit or originate from London. The term Londoner is generally accepted as covering all people from Greater London.
.london could be a reasonable TLD for the community of Londoners and a natural complement to the .uk TLD which is the TLD of the community the United Kingdom. Laws in the United Kingdom defer the management of TLDs to the private sector. If the .london application fulfils the proposed criteria for both the string and the applicants organisation, the TLD should be approved.
[edit] .αθήνα (.athens)
Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece and the birthplace of democracy. Named after goddess Athena, Athens is a cosmopolitan metropolis with a population of 3.7 million people. People in Athens speak Modern Greek which is distinctive from ancient forms of the Greek language and alphabet. Over 15 million people speak Modern Greek in Greece and Cyprus.
.αθήνα would fit best in the daily life of the Athens and Greek community since IDNs on the Second-Level are already introduced and used in Greece.
[edit] .東京 (.tokyo)
Although not a single city, the Tokyo metropolis is home to the Japanese government and emperor and is considered to be the capital of Japan. About 12 million people live in Tokyo, while about 33–36 million people live in the entire greater Tokyo area, making it part of the most populated urban area on earth. Tokyo is one of the 55 World Cities.
Although hardly to key in on a Latin character keyboard a .東京 TLD makes sense. The target market for a .東京 TLD would be the greater Tokyo area. The string .東京 would give the most meaning to the community and should be considered as TLD.
[edit] .sanjose / .sanjosé
There are besides other towns and counties two major cities with the name San José. One of them is San José, the capital city of Costa Rica with 310.000 inhabitants. The other big San Jose is in California, United States, and counts 910.000 inhabitants.
We propose that the applicant for a .sanjose /.sanjosé should show measures not to exclude people and entities from other regional authorities with the name San Jose or San José from registering domains.
[edit] .cym
The Welsh (Cymry) are an ethnic community associated with Wales and the Welsh language, which is a Celtic language. The ISO 639-2 codes are .wel and .cym. The string .cym is the endonym-based abbreviation and language code. The community has a size of nearly 1 million people. A TLD application for .cym should clearly be approved if the proposed TLD organisation is accountable to the Welsh language community. Conversely, neither .cym nor .wel should not be available for other purposes. The same applies of course to the full language names Cymraeg or Gymraeg or Welsh, and to the country name Cymru or Wales.
[edit] When is the community too small or too big?
[edit] .heidelberg
Heidelberg is a scenic city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, halfway between Stuttgart and Frankfurt. As of 2005, 140,000 people live within the city's area. There's no significant sub-urban area. Heidelberg is a fovourite touristic destination to US and Japanese visitors and is known by a number of United States Military installations in and around Heidelberg, including the Headquarters of the United States Army in Europe.
Without external or local government funding, it would be probably be difficult to present a feasible and sound business plan for .heidelberg. The community is clearly too small to raise significant domain registrations and generate enough revenues to pay back the application cost and the running TLD management costs. But if the applicant has community support and financial stability, ICANN could approve the TLD.
[edit] .africa
There are only a few possibilities left to designate a continent by a TLD string. The European Union has it .eu string and Asia is served by .asia.
One line of thought is to argue that .africa this string should only be approved if a supranational African organisation or an organisation which has support of most African nations and communities applies. This may be unrealistic.
The other line of thought is to apply the criteria that were used in the case of .asia, namely the absence of objections voiced by relevant governments.
[edit] Politically sensitive strings
There are a lot of communities worldwide with common roots in culture, language, territory or other heritage which claim to become an autonomous community or authority.
In the case of .cat and .asia, the principle used was to see if there were no objections from the relevant national governments. Of course the way in which the question is asked has some importance. There is a huge different between a government stating that it supports TLD and a government stating that it has no objections. And there is also a big difference between not objecting (i.e. not sending a letter to ICANN) and officially stating there there are no objections.
The most practical approach in this case is to publish applications and offer a challenge period. Once a government - or the GAC - has gone on record with objections or concerns, there is a reason to put the application (and the string) on hold until the controversy is settled.
[edit] Hypothetical cases in which a geoTLD should not be approved
[edit] .new@york / .東yo
TLD strings which potentially could harm security and stability with the DNS should not be allowed. These include pure numbers (confusing to IP-numbers), strings with mixed letters between different character sets and strings with symbols like @, $ or .(points).
[edit] .py (cyrillic)
The cyrillic transliteration of the string .ru results in a string that matches .py, the ccTLD for Paraguay, .py.
This case can be handled by the principle that new TLDs should not be confusingly similar to existing TLDs.
It may be worthwhile going further and apply the priniciple that no two-letter IDN.IDN TLDs that may be visually confused with any two-letter Latin string should be introduced. The reason is that a new ISO-3166 codes may be introduced at a later stage.
[edit] Can three-letter strings be confusable with ccTLDs?
It can been argued that a new three-letter TLD could be confusable with a ccTLD because the the difference resides in the omission or addition of a single letter.
In general there is no problem with TLD strings which differ only in one letter to existing ones. There are several examples where similar strings do not cause technical problems or confusion:
- .co (ccTLD Columbia) / .com
- .ne (ccTLD Niger) / .net
- .bi (ccTLD Belize) / .biz
- .in (ccTLD India) / info
[edit] Natural name collisions
Other than in the case of homony cities, there are no so many obvious cases of natural name collisions. One of them is the name of Rom or Roma. The citizens of Rome are called Romani in Italian, as they were also called in Latin.
The endonym for the city of Rome is Roma. Not only is Rome a modern-day world city, but also the cultural root. In several languages Rome is called Rom.
Roma and some variants such as Rom or Rrom and Romani or Romany designate the Roma people and language, respectively. ISO 639-2 for Sinti and Romani language is "rom", although sometimes the subgroup codes from the Ethnologue classification are used (e.g. "rmy"). The Romany and Sinti, which are nomadic communities usually called "Gypsies" in English. Their communities are known in German and Dutch as Zigeuner and in Italian as Zingari. The community of romanies and sinti counts over 10 million people and includes heterogeneous ethnic groups who live primarily in Southern and Eastern Europe, Western Asia, Latin America, the southern part of the United States and the Middle East. They are believed to have originated mostly from the Rajasthan region of India.
A TLD for the Romany language could express the desire of the Romany and Sinti community to create a common namespace for their cultural and linguistic activities. Since the community is spread over various territories, there is no goverment which is charge of the community. If there's an application for .romani it is likely that the application would fulfil the proposed criteria for both the string and the applicants organisation. In this case the TLD should be granted.
If both the city of Rome and representative organizations for the Romany people applied for a TLD, it would probably be easy to agree on two non-confusable strings, e.g. .roma for they city Rome and .rmy for the Romany language.
On the other hand the use of ".rom" by anyone would be a bad idea, as it could be too easily confused.
[edit] Offensive TLD strings
This danger can probable be best avoided through a simple principle, such as:
"A TLD must not be designed to offend, racially discriminate, incite to hatred or cause harm."
While the principle is simple, the interpretation of course requires skills. These are, however, precisely the skills that ICANN, the independent evalutators and the GAC must have.
Some geo strings could have be offensive. A hypothetical example is ".ostmark". This string would imply a Neo-Nazi view because (besides other, non-offensive meanings) the word was used by the Nazi regime to designate the territory of Austria. This string could offend many people, and would potentially be used for bad faith purposes or illegal content. Such a TLD could be problematic and the exclusion of the string for TLD purposes could be based on the fact that it is deliberately designed to offend, while there is no recognizeable ethnic or cultural community that would indeed want to identify itself with that word.
[edit] TLD-level cybersquatting
Depending on the details of the gLTD application process, a financially solid organization may simply send in a large number of appliations for valuable strings. These are likely to be geo strings.
If the purpose of these applications appears to be the re-sale of the TLD to the respective communities, then the TLDs should not be granted. One could of course expect that such an applicant would be smart enough to disguise the cybersquatting intent. The positive aspect here is that a good "disguise" will invitably push the applicant towards raising real community support. In other words, as long as the evaluators do make a credible analysis of community support, the speculators are motivated to use their capital in a way to support the communities.
By Werner Staub and Dirk Krischenowski
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