Sao Paulo city in Brazil has briefly become the focal point for lobby groups wanting to establish new top level domain names or TLDs. A New York initiative called the .nyc Development Corp believes there is a need to have web addresses that end with .nyc, while the dot BERLIN GmbH & Co. KG argues that there is pent up demand for the .berlin suffix.

The Berliners formed a Limited Commercial Partnership to coordinate lobbying efforts aimed at convincing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to approve the new city TLD. This initiative claims to have a staff of six people working with the support of “more than 30 organisations and persons that represent the community of Berliners”.

The dotBerlin application contends that the namespace within the .de and other TLDs is becoming increasingly scarce and that the organisation has proven demand for .berlin within the community. It also correctly points out that other cities will go for their respective TLDs.

New Yorkers supporting the .nyc initiative have added their voices to the calls for city TLDs saying that .nyc would improve the quality of life in the city, broaden internet access and development as well as allow better marketing of itself as a tourist destination. They also say that, “New York City will be better able to position itself alongside entities like Singapore (.sg) and Hong Kong (.hk) which already have TLDs”.

The dotasia organisation goes beyond the concept of a city TLD – it has already presented paperwork (in the virtual sense) to ICANN for setting up a sponsored TLD called .asia. The group based in Hong Kong already appears to have an agreement in place with Afilias for technical support of the sTLD.

Dot Africa is lagging behind its Asian counterparts but the initiative for an Africa wide suffix is gaining momentum. A .Africa TLD would be of interest to pan African organisations such as the African Union, Nepad and various sporting bodies. Any business entity operating on a continental scale – and the number is growing daily – would certainly see the advantages of having a generic dot Africa domain name.

Many South African businesses have encountered resistance to their proposals because of the perception that the continent is gradually falling under the hegemony of the South. Africans north of the Limpopo resent the apparent economic imperialism of South Africa, so if a company operated under a pan African, .Africa web address, rather than a .co.za address, it could be easier to negotiate better deals.

Some delegates at the Sao Paulo meeting have accused ICANN of being unreasonably reluctant to open the field to more top level domains. They say that this reluctance has created an artificial scarcity of TLDs which has in turn, increased their value.

A counter-argument to this line of reasoning would include the fact that the most recently created TLDs such as .aero . coop and .museum have not experienced huge popularity.

ICANN has just published a discussion document proposing alterations to the country code TLDs or ccTLDs. The proposed changes include Zaire's (.zr) renaming to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (.cd); East Timor's code changing from .tp to .tl and Czechoslovakia’s .cs division into the Czech Republic .cz and Slovakia .sk.

The break-up of the Soviet Union .su sees the birth of new codes for new states such as .ru, .by and .ua.

/ENDS