theatlanticcities.com, just covered the coming New gTLD Geographic domain names calling them perfectly tailored for city residents, businesses, & services”

Here are some of the more interesting points from the story:

“Dozens of municipal governments, from Durban to Taipei, have claimed corresponding top level domains (TLDs) — even the wordy ones like .amsterdam and .helsinki — in the hopes that a domain will soon become as important to the global city brand in 2020 as a website was in 2000”.

“Essentially, each of these cities has a chance to design its own microcosm of the Internet a miniature network perfectly tailored for city residents, businesses, and services.”

“There’s big money on the table,” says Thies Lindenthal, a researcher at MIT’s Center for Real Estate who studies domain speculation. “Nobody really knows whether it’s going to pay off.”

“The dozens of cities that applied for their own domains, the thinking goes, custom TLDs could help local businesses gain a secure footing on the web, with a boost from an urban brand. “It will really help small businesses promote and identify themselves right away,” says Marybeth Ihle, the press secretary for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. A top level domain — .nyc  — has been part of the city’s digital road map since 2009, when ICANN first announced the expansion. “We really see it as part of NYC leading the way,” Ihle says.

 

“It’s very, very good for small businesses,” says Anthony Van Couvering, the CEO of Top Level Domain Holdings, which is managing bids for Budapest, Rome, and Miami. “If you are, for instance, at plumbing.com, that’s a great name. But it doesn’t lead to people calling you up to fix your pipes. Whereas plumbing.miami, you’re pretty sure that’s the local guy.”

 

“Researching city-based URLs, Lindenthal found that in Boston and Memphis, businesses and organizations initially leaned toward websites that featured the city’s name + one keyword. But in both cities, that trend was later surpassed by registrants taking names with the city + two keywords, indicating a growing shortage of concise domain names. The largest U.S. cities, he says, already have their names appear in tens of thousands of URLs”.

 

“If cities are serious about promoting their own domains — and they ought to be, since many of them stand to make a profit from address sales — these URLs could become familiar, trustworthy, and eventually, a quintessential part of a local business brand. Cities could lead by example, transferring government agencies onto new domains, giving .madrid or .hamburg an aura of legitimacy that companies and organizations would be eager to tap into.”

 

“By that same token, if geographic TLDs figure prominently into search rankings, it will spur more businesses to join, and thereby further improve a TLD’s search engine power. Anytime you search for something with a geographic qualifier — Tokyo newspaper, for example — the Tokyo domain would move higher in the ranks. “It’s a virtuous cycle,” says Van Couvering.”

 

“Most importantly, there’s potential for real innovation. Control over a top level domain will give city governments a chance to reserve easily accessible addresses for key departments and civic organizations, rather than relegating them to obscurity with successions of backslashes and links.”

“Community boards and business improvement districts could find themselves in places of renewed importance. And cities could go further still: pages like news.dubai or traffic.sydney could be designated for particular uses, and then auctioned off. With some imagination, it’s a chance for cities to start fresh and dictate the design of a new Internet.”

 

“Boston will be one to watch. Rather than an Internet real estate company like Neustarr or Top Level Domain Holding, Boston’s bid is being handled by the Boston Globe, with technical help from Open Registry.”

 

“If municipal TLDs work as well as their investors believe, the Globe will have put itself at the center of a powerful and lucrative 21st-century municipal information network. It’s a potentially shrewd move by the paper, but an equally interesting decision by the City of Boston to support its largest newspaper’s bid to manage the municipal top level domain — the paper may have found a new component of its business model, but the city is helping it along.”