Cairo, 05.11.2008 – Initiatives for City Top-Level Domains found interest group at ICANN: At the 33rd public ICANN meeting which is being held in Cairo until November 7, discussions focus on the Draft Applicant Guidebook for new generic Top-Level Domains (TLDs). Increasingly, TLDs for cities (cityTLDs) are being viewed as particularly promising. In Cairo, the two initiatives for .hamburg and .bcn (Barcelona) publicly presented their plans for namespaces for cities for the first time.
Notwithstanding the different governance models of the existing initiatives, they have quite a few common interests and face similar challenges. At the same time, the particular issues of the cityTLDs are currently not adequately represented in the ICANN structure. Therefore, the initiatives for .berlin, .bcn, .hamburg, .nyc and .paris have decided to found an interest group for cityTLDs within ICANN. Dirk Krischenowski, Founder and CEO of dotBERLIN, announced this today at the public meeting of the GNSO-Council (Generic Names Supporting Organisation). The exact status of the group within the ICANN structure has yet to be defined.
Krischenowski further announced that the group is preparing comments for the Draft Applicant Guidebook. In particular, the proposed schedule, the proposed fees and the suggested evaluation system are being critized by the group.