This week during the Fairwinds Beyond The Dot conference held in Washington, Jeff Neuman of Neustar, laid out some more interesting information about the new .NYC extension which Neustar will be running in cooperation with the city of New York.
Domaininvesting.com covered some basic eligibility a few days ago, including that a registrant be an entity, business or resident who has a physical location in New York.
For one no privacy registrations will be allowed.
Each registration will have to contain the entity, business or resident of New York who actually is at the location and yes Neustar promises to verify each new registration and each domain transfer of a .NYC domain.
Since the registrant will have to match voter records, tax record business filings, drivers licenses and such it seems a virtual address isn’t going to work and privacy is strictly prohibited.
Neustar operates the .US domain name extension which also has a nexus requirement for registrants for a .US domain names and has been known to pull a registration from registrants even if a domain name was purchased in the aftermarket.
Is .NYC overreacting? .LA has been around for quite a long time.
.LA is the country code for Laos that has been branded to mean the city but the city of LA has nothing to do with the extension or its operation so one has nothing to do with the other
I understand the motivation behind that requirement. However, it may prove somewhat excessive. Many online businesses about a place (e.g. travel) are not physically based in that place. And U.S. citizens in metropolitan areas tend to be very mobile. Many of us move from state to state to state to state and are sometimes found outside the country. Worrying about maintaining a physical address in a particular city — and a particularly expensive city — means an added risk or burden. Some legitimate online business will be justifiably scared away by this.
I agree Joseph, but I think New York is trying to convey a message, “This belongs to us, everyone one else keep out, we will defend this extension”
When you have the support for an extension from the underlying population of that geo I think it goes a long way and will insure no or minimal parked pages and that residents lose out to outsiders.
Aftermarket is probably going to be very small and this may be the poster child or the antithesis of the Aron Meystedt comment on domainers getting all the good names.
This is supposedly what the new gtld program was created for, unfortunately most other extensions will not have the luxury that .Nyc has, maybe someone like .London where businesses seem to be lining up, if recent press is to be believed.
I think you’re right, Raymond. Overall, what .NYC is doing will cut down on domain speculation and lead to more actual website / brand launches. It’s almost impossible to get the balance completely right in this world of ours. Overshoot undershoot overshoot undershoot etc.