** Audio and video now posted below!**
Last October the NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) issued a request for proposals for “services to obtain, manage, administer, maintain and market the geographic Top Domain name .nyc.”. At ICANN’s recent 37th meeting in Nairobi, consensus was reached on the “overarching” issue of intellectual property protection. This leaves only the issue of the final (4th) draft of the Applicants Guidebook, expected before the 38th meeting in Brussels in June 2010, before the much delayed new generic top level domain (gTLD) delegation process can finally grind into action. (One caveat – a policy forbidding cross-ownership of registries and registrars is still not totally set in stone.)
The Internet Society – New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) has for some years been following the .nyc and ICANN process on behalf of the NYC community and, on May 8 2010, hosted a seminar “dot nyc – How are we doing?” at NYU. NYC Council Member Gale Brewer delivered keynote remarks, then vendor Eric Brunner-Williams of CORE Internet Council of Registrars revealed details of their proposal to the City, and Antony Van Couvering of Minds + Machines and Public Advocate Beill DeBlasio’s earlier comments to the City Council were shown in video. There was a discussion “What’s it for?” about possible applications – civic, community, commercial, and “outside the box” – for a local top level domain. Speakers included Tom Lowenhaupt of Connecting .nyc and Richard Knipel of Wikimedia NYC.
Audio/video is below:
ISOC-NY Event: dot nyc – How are we doing?
When: Saturday May 8 2010 : 1pm – 4:30pm EST (1700-2030 UTC)
Part 1:
Keynote: Gale A. Brewer
Eric Brunner Williams – CORE
Part 2:
Bill deBlasio – NYC Public Advocate (on video)
Antony Van Couvering – Minds + Machines (on video)
Tom Lowenhaupdt – Connecting .nyc
Richard Knipel – Wikimedia NYC
Gale Brewer
Council Member Gale A. Brewer has been representing the Upper West Side and Upper Clinton in the New York City Council since 2002. Gale chaired the Committee on Technology in Government from 2002-2009, in which she continues to sit. She currently chairs the Committee on Governmental Operations.
Eric Brunner-Williams
Eric is Chief Technical Officer for CORE, an international not-for-profit membership association of Internet domain name registrars. As such he is responsible for the technical correctness of CORE’s new TLD applications. Previous TLD applications he has contributed technical content to, on behalf of several clients, are .CAT, .ORG, .BIZ,.US, .COOP, and .MUSEUM. Eric was one of the principle contributors to the IETF’s PROVREG Working Group which wrote the EPP RFC series. Eric leads a gTLD project for Native American and Indigenous Peoples, and is an active member in the extended California and Oklahoma Cherokee, and Maine Abenaki communities.
Antony Van Couvering
Antony is CEO of Minds + Machines, a registry services and consulting company for new TLDs. Antony has been working with domain names since he founded Netnames USA in 1997. He started three domain name companies (NetNames USA, RegisterFREE, and NameEngine) and later sold them, the last one to VeriSign. He also started up several ccTLDs, including .TM, .BT, .AS and others.
Tom Lowenhaupt
Tom’s involvement with Internet governance began with comments he filed on the NTIA’s 1998 Internet governance NPRM. He is a former long time member of Community Board 15 in Queens, where the idea of the establishment of a .nyc TLD as a public resouce was first mooted in 2001. In April 2007, invigorated by similar efforts in other international cities, he formed ‘Connecting .nyc‘, a non-profit that has been working since then to assure that the delegation and operation of any such domain be in the the public interest of the NYC community.
Richard Knipel
Richard is President of Wikimedia New York City, an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation
Meetup: http://internetpro.meetup.com/51/calendar/13100813/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=108703639164601
I hope we have the opportunity to get into governance, as that’s the essence of the TLDs success of failure.
Perhaps Council Member Brewer will provide some insight as to the city’s view of the channels for public engagement in the .nyc TLD’s development, about transparency of operation, and accountability.
As well, it would be good for the vendor(s) to speak on the topic. For my part, I will talk about our proposed governance structure for the dotNeighborhood names.
Tom Lowenhaupt