[Gnso-newgtld-wg-wt5] Conference call: city names

[David Cake]

Perth is not even unique within Australia, there is a small town in Tasmania. But the point about ambiguity remaining even if we restrict it to concepts like ‘capital’ is a very good one.

David (resident of the Western Australian Perth)

> On 30 Apr 2018, at 1:18 pm, Liz Williams <liz.williams at auda.org.au> wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone
> 
> I wanted to start a new thread of conversation about city names ahead of our upcoming conference call.   We are being encouraged by our co-chairs to think about city names as TLDs. The first point is, perhaps, to recognise the “success” of some previous city TLDs including Berlin, Paris, NYC and so on.  Those applications went through very specific requirements for evaluation and, now, hopefully serve the requirements of local communities.  We should hope that, in any new round, the experiences of those cities will ease the way for future applications because we have learnt something about how and why applicants apply for place names (and I use the word place deliberately) as top level domain labels.
> 
> For our next round of policy recommendations I wanted to use an example which I think highlights the difficulties we face if we are prescriptive and limited in our analysis.
> 
> Most of us know that Perth is the capital city of Western Australia.  It is not the capital city of Australia as Canberra has that honour.  Relying on a “is the word a capital city” question is fraught with difficulty.   It is difficult because Perth, Scotland, has at a bare minimum had city status since the 12th century, far longer than Perth, Australia which also has an indigenous place name, its colonial name and a migrant demographic where the largest majority of Perth residents come from England.  Things are complicated by the existence of Perth in Canada which, in its own right, has some features of a capital and, at the very least, some important historic linkages.
> 
> And then we turn to the generic words which Jon Nevett highlighted in a previous post (Bath, Save, New) which are also place names.
> 
> That leads us to what can we usefully and objectively recommend as treatment of other names which are also linked to places and how those could be treated as top level domains.  As a starting point, my recommendation would be that we don’t have any special treatment for place names as TLDs and that applicants for those names would be evaluated against other business and technical criteria just like another application.  However, we might want to think about better ways of handling an objection.  Those objections, from whatever quarter, need to be treated in exactly the same way.  I don’t recommend “letters of support or non-objection”.  They are too subjective, fraught with movable political nuance and, in some cases, deeply sensitive geo-political facts (using Jerusalem as the example).
> 
> I look forward to hearing the views of others.
> 
> Liz
> ….
> Dr Liz Williams | International Affairs
> .au Domain Administration Ltd
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> 
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