New York City Launches .nyc Domain Names | Hacker News Reader

New York City Launches .nyc Domain Names

mydotnyc.com

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They're "launching" the TLD before their application has even been approved?!

EDIT: My mistake, their site just doesn't mention the approval. Confirmed in replies.

Their FAQ includes "When can I register a .nyc domain name?

Domain names are currently expected to become available in late 2013 after ICANN approves the City’s application. "

and

"Upon acceptance of its application for the .nyc domain, the City of New York intends to enter into an agreement with ICANN under which it will have control over the administration and management of the .nyc domain."

Perhaps they know more than us, but they seem very confident that they'll be getting approved. Nobody else applied for .nyc, but I don't recall it ever being indicated that was enough to guarantee approval.

Yeah, .nyc is such a narrow area that it doesn't deserve it's own TLD.

Would any country smaller, economically or in population, than NYC also be too narrow to deserve its own TLD?

I think the difference is in degrees of independence. That's obviously way too subjective (and would become political), but my point is that a small independent island nation is more independent than NYC, which is obviously 'just' a big city in the USA. NYC is served completely by .us or .com which anecdotally seems to be used heavily within the USA, while generic small island nation isn't served by any tld sufficiently.

There is a claim it has been approved http://gigaom.com/2013/07/02/new-york-city-gets-own-domain-n...

BBC and Bloomberg also saying the same thing [0][1].

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23150658 [1] http://www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=A08875E3-C29...

That's why they call it a Minimum Viable Product. :)

The only motivation behind this is absurd profit for those selling domain names, and I doubt that NYC will even see that money (does anybody know more information about this?).

Otherwise, I don't see how this would help a company identify in any useful way especially because we are talking about internet addresses here. How would ordering a product from webstore.nyc be any more helpful than webstore.com? It seems like a useless novelty, and will add more complexity and confusion to URL's in general as other cities get their own TLD's from the US and globally.

Registrars are a very low-margin business these days. I assume you mean registry.

Thanks for pointing that out. I edited to have a broader meaning, because I think there is a potential exploitation done by domain squatters in addition.

People take great pride in where their business is based. And making that fact know is valuable. Whether it is a brewery in Bend, Oregon, a tech firm in Mountain View or a fashion company in New York City.

To have a domain which instantly says where you are is valuable.

So, another motivation might be branding the city and the businesses which function within the city.

NYC already has the Made in NY program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_NY this is another step in the city branding itself and its industry.

This is interesting. I take this as another step towards New York City being recognized as a nation of it's own, much like The City [1] and Vatican City [2]. The United Nations HQ is already based there, so it has a good claim to said sovereignty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_city

The city of London is not a nation. I think you misread the Wikipedia article; as well as being a separate city, it's a separate county, not country.

I personally like the idea of independent city-states but historically they have not fared terribly well. I think you'll see a resurgence of this idea in outer space in the coming decades.

Venice, Florance, Singapore, Hong Kong? Rome was originally a city state.

That's a pretty small number of success stories relative to the # of potential candidates, no? Also, none of them except Singapore is still fully self-determining, and Singapore is on a pretty small island rather than being embedded in a larger land mass.

You realize that essentially anyone can buy a TLD these days? It's not sign of anything but excess wealth and/or vanity.

The City is not a sovereign entity. It owes its allegiance to the Crown, but it has been granted certain inalienable privileges over the years.

Vatican City on the other hand is a sovereign entity under the Lateran Treaty, and is recognized as such by international law.

Under US law it is very difficult to see how either would be possible without a Constitutional amendment.

Halsbury's Laws of England: Local Government says this about the relationship between the Lord Mayor of the City of London (not the Mayor of Greater London) and the Queen:

By ancient custom the Lord Mayor tenders the City Sword to the Sovereign when she enters the City on state occasions, in token acknowledgement of her overriding authority. The Sovereign touches the sword and, by that gesture, returns it to the Lord Mayor with implied permission to carry it before her whilst she is in the City. Also by ancient custom the permission of the Lord Mayor is sought for the passage of troops through the City, and he receives quarterly, under the Sovereign's sign manual, the password of the Tower of London. As spokesman for the citizens, he is entitled to the right of special access to the Sovereign.

They're essentially a small enclave of "free" [1] people who are allied with Liz, smack dab in the middle of London. Most of the previous Lord Mayors of the City of London were descendants of the people who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. If, in order to stay in honor of the rules of law, they must grant her a faux sovereignty in their kingdom, it's to do her honor that she would not normally [2] need bestowed on her, in order to keep her allied with The City.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City#Freedom_of...

[2] (Free people are all "kings" or "sovereign")

"Finding a search result that is located in NYC can be challenging. Search engines often generate millions of results. Make your NYC business, organization or content easier for users to find."

How exactly is .nyc going to help in search results? Are we to believe that Google's going to give special priority to new sites just because they have .nyc?

Also, the "offers services to New Yorkers" makes it sound like it's going to be pretty open to any site, diminishing the (albeit limited) point.

Hmm, Google do treat TLDs very sensibly for their country specific websites, at least in the UK I get pretty smart results including .co.uk stuff. I think that's based off the fact I search from google.co.uk, which they automate a redirect to - not sure if they could do that for NYC residents as easily.

That said, I'd speculate that Google will deal with these new ones intelligently. Not only because they have a huge amount of applications for them, but also because if they do take off it'd be silly for a search engine not to be dealing with them appropriately.

Perhaps it's referring to the ability to do a search like *.nyc, which should only return sites with the nyc TLD.

All they are doing is trying to bilk local (non-internet company) business owners who won't know better because they are busy running a business, not figuring out how search engines and TLDs work.

It would be confusing if a NYC business with a .nyc domain relocated to SF. This domain would probably be most useful for city government agencies or institutions like the Museum of Natural History that are never likely to relocate. More generic TLDs make it much easier to geographically relocate your business.

Most businesses aren't web businesses. bobstacos.nyc, joespromdesses.nyc, tekserve.nyc, saks.nyc, perse.nyc, et cetera et cetera.

But a non-web business, even a fairly small one, can also move out of NYC or open additional branches outside NYC as it expands. For example, I know a sushi restaurant that has two branches in NYC and one in NJ. For that matter, Saks has several stores outside of NYC: Boston, Philadelphia, etc. Tying your brand to a .nyc domain could be quite limiting and make your locations outside NYC harder to search for.

This is actually pretty cool. Over here in Europe every (most) websites end in a country specific TLD so we know where the website is based. We can see instantly a .fr domain means the website/store is based in France, or .de for Germany, etc and so on. It's not common at all to have a .com for your website.

I suspect in America it's going to be really confusing for people though because as far as I can tell everything is a .com. People probably won't be so keen on adopting a .nyc domain for their NYC based business because everything else is a .com so it might seem lesser or cheap or "not the real thing."

We do have the (neglected) .us domain. New York City should be .ny.ny.us

It's nyc.ny.us, which is actually in use already. This display of ignorance is a very badly-scaling use of the one and only namespace DNS has.

>Who can register .nyc domains?

>New York City businesses and organizations with a NYC address, individuals with a primary residence in NYC, as well as those offering products or services to New Yorkers can register a .nyc domain name.

Isn't that pretty much every nonlocal web app?

Yes. Further down in the FAQ, it clarifies that .nyc is available to everybody, but preference will be given to those with a NYC address. (It doesn't further clarify, but I assume that means that in the immediate rush of registrations, when two people attempt to purchase the same domain name, preference will be given to those registering with a local address.)

Let the X.nyc goldrush begin.

s.nyc (sync), th.nyc (think), p.nyc (pink), etc...

st.nyc - The homepage for the hot-garbage and urine smell of the big apple!

st.nyc - Santa's homepage.

More like th-neek, p-neek... thync and pync would work though.

ns.nyc for fans of a certain boy-band...

why would anyone buy a .nyc domain to use for the *nk sound?

bceuase hmunas can tpycaliy raed wrods jsut fnie as lnog as the frist and lsat ltetres are in palce.

Except two of those examples fail your conditions?

everybody pa.nyc!

Also: http://www.scrabblefinder.com/ends-with/Nic/

cy.nyc

sce.nyc

iro.nyc

Oh my God, we're going to see a wave of insufferably named -nyc start-ups now, aren't we?

I thought it was bad enough with -ly and -io.

more NYC real estate that I can't afford... 0sqft

Glad they wasted 200k to apply for this dumb TLD

Off topic: Where's my Californian's who want .cali

LL Cool J much?

Yeah, but then you would also need .nocali and .socali. Then the the .nocali folks would be upset because .socali seems _so_ much more .cali, but the .socali folks would be like whatever dudez.

sex.nyc, here I come.

Wooo suck it .la and .sfc! #1! #1! #1!

Thanks to Laos, Los Angeles has had a domain for a while now.

https://www.la/

I think it's awful to rebrand another country's TLD like this. We are talking about an extremely poor third world country. It would surprise me if any of the profits made from www.la ever goes to someone in Lao. It would also be very interesting to know how they acquired the rights of selling the .LA domain since we are talking about a Socialist State which is known for its severe corruption.

This feels like Colonization 2.0.

Colonization by whom?

.la seems to have fairly colorful history:

http://www.icannwatch.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/09/2023248

I guess Lao is getting something from the "long-term contractual relationship" they have entered.

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