Im Rahmen des ICANN Public Forum habe ich einmal wieder die Gelegenheit ein Update zu .berlin zu geben:
„Our .berlin (dotBERLIN) initiative has been around for a while – 3 years or 10 ICANN meetings by now, so we had enough time to build a well developed and solid community.
Our community consists of over 90 partners that represent tens of thousands of SMEs, city institutions, individuals and a lot of others. They are from culture to sports, tourism and a piece of anything the community of Berliners consists of. We also reached Berlins worldwide.
We appreciate the progress ICANN has made in the new TLD process which is solid now to handle various applications. We also appreciate the recently introduced community track in this sense. This reflects the special needs GeoTLDs like .berlin have.
The GeoTLDs had their big coming out on Monday when the International Herald Tribune featured .paris, .berlin and .gal in a comprehensive article. This article showed how positive and encouraging global communication about new TLDs can be made.
I also want to share a piece of information which Google executives gave us recently to underline the importance of the ongoing regionalization of the Internet and the trend to local identity.
First: Today, 50% of all search inquiries include a geographical identifier. People simply search for „hotel paris”, „starbucks berlin” or „schools nyc”.
Second: Search results need good and that means precise domain names to reflect the identity of the web content. They also said: „Can you imagine street addresses being just numbers or YOU being a number instead of your firstname and lastname.
All of us need and want identity.”