[NA-Discuss] Fwd: Edits and comments to NARALO/ALAC position statement on GAC scorecard

Antony Van Couvering avc at avc.vc
Thu Mar 31 22:40:39 UTC 2011


> Anyone in NY who wants a city-specific domain has had new-york.ny.us 
> available for over a decade.  If you've never heard of it, that's because 
> nobody was ever interested.  


Of course they're not interested in new-york.ny.us.  It has a hyphen and two dots.  It's the same reason that museums hate .museum, a ludicrous naming structure (I know this because many of my family work in museums).  Under that structure, the American Museum of Natural History in New York would have to be american-museum-of-natural-history.new-york.museum.   Are you really surprised they passed on that?

Guess what?  The City of New York is not interested in it either.  Members of the city government expressed to me that what they were really unhappy about were newyork.com not being in their hands. Why?  Because it's memorable and short of course. 

ccTLDs are getting rid of their subdomained naming structures because people can't stand them.  Ask .PH how happy they are that they moved to a flat namespace.  Ask .DE and .CH how happy they are that they went with a flat namespace to begin with. They prefer a flat structure with an easy-to-use name.  Years ago, I talked at length with Jon Postel about the .US domain (and worked with him on a proposal to change how it worked) largely because of this (that and certain unresponsive local admins).  

Citing as evidence that people won't eat Aunt Millie's Christmas pudding that's been sitting in the back of the freezer for 12 years doesn't mean they're not hungry. 

Antony





More information about the NA-Discuss mailing list