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Just to inform the people who are interested in news about the prospective TLD candidate dotBERLIN: At the ceremonial awards for the eco Internet Awards, dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG won the special award of the German Internet industry. dotBERLIN aims to create a new domain ending .berlin (a top-level domain), which will result in a local identity for Berliners in the Internet, providing an alternative to addresses such as .de and .com. .berlin has become a trailblazer, setting a trend which has since been followed by other large cities such as New York and Paris. The annual eco Internet Award is given to companies, with a product or a project, which makes an important contribution to the German Internet industry. Previous winners were iTunes and openBC/Xing.com.
"The introduction of .berlin is only consistent", said Harald Summa, general manager of the eco association, in his speech. "We have known for quite some time now, that the principle 'business is local' applies in the worldwide Internet and that local offerings are constantly increasing. This means that .berlin is another step in the right direction and a signal for a greater local identity in the worldwide network. For this, we wish the initiators courage, endurance and the ability to get things done."
Almost 200 companies have applied for awards in the various categories. The prize is awarded by the Association of the German Internet Industry - eco (www.eco.de).
Read full story: External Source
Related topics: DNS, Domain Registries, Top-Level Domains
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A few questions on this proposal:
- Why .berlin instead of .bern, which is more linguistically correct?
- How many other such localities should have their name in the root? 100? 10,000? Based on what criteria?
- Would people from Berlin, Ohio be able to register in the TLD? If not, why not?
Paul Hoffman said:
??? Why?
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin
Paul,
to #1: Berlin is a city in Switzerland which might want to have their own TLD one day as well. We are Berliners from Germany, so we are heading for .berlin
to #2: ICANN currently set the criteria for new TLDs. When they are finished we'll see how high are the financial, operational and technical hurdles to get a local TLD (also called GeoTLDs) approved. I assume the only metropolises will be able to successed.
to #3: People and organisations from all incorporated regional authorities will be able to register .berlin domain names. We're planning to have a nexus requirement like .us, .asia and .cat have.
Best from Berlin
Dirk
Where is it? I cannot find a "Berlin" in Switzerland.
Paul was meaning the city of BERN in Switzerland, I think.
Dirk
I'd suggest that the TLD for NYC be ".fuhgeddaboudit". Anyone got a problem with that?
I'm all for geographic domain names, both for purposes of keeping infrastructure needed for local communications local and for avoiding trademark collisions (how many Chinese restaurants are there in the world called The Great Wall, for instance?). However, doing a TLD for every city in the root doesn't scale, and setting the bar high enough that only some cities qualify is confusing.
There is a geographic hierarchy under .us (for example, ann-arbor.mi.us or berkeley.ca.us) that doesn't get much use. Partly, that's because it was never marketed the way .com was. Partly, it's because there was a different registry and registrar for every town. That was a lot more than most hosting companies would have wanted to keep track of, and some of them weren't very responsive. But if you can convince people to use different domains based on what city they're in, and if you can put together a registration interface that works across the patchwork of local TLDs, doing it as a hierarchy seems a lot more scalable. Why not do something similar, and create .berlin.de?