One issue that I hope ICANN will resolve is the allocation process for Dot-City TLDs in those situations where a city name exists in more than one country/state/province in the world, e.g. Paris-France, Paris-Texas-US, Paris-Tennessee-US, Paris-Illinois-US, etc.

Perhaps this is a dumb question, but, in order to solve this problem, can we dispense with the “WWW” in the url naming convention and replace it with a “ccTLD”? For example, Paris and Berlin could be allocated as follows:

1) fr.domain.paris
2) us.tx.domain.paris
3) us.il.domain.paris
4) us.tn.domain.paris
5) de.domain.berlin
6) us.nj.domain.berlin
7) us.mi.domain.berlin

The advantage of using ICANN’s existing list of ccTLDs is that most Internet users are aware of the ccTLDs. Therefore, we wouldn’t have to worry about getting the Internet community up a steep learning curve. Also, this approach seems rationale since Dot-City TLDs are designed to appeal to a local region within a particular country/state/province. The ccTLD speaks to a particular region whereas the “WWW” speaks to the entire world. Having the ccTLD at the beginning of the naming convention instead of the “WWW” would further narrow the scope of the Dot-City TLD to a particular country/state/province.

I’m also curious if search engines could take advantage of this approach by cutting indexes along these paths. For instance, perform a keyword search within a group of Dot-City domains in Germany, e.g. de.cars.berlin, de.cars.munich, de.cars.frankfurt, etc., or narrow the search down to de.cars.berlin.

Also, if someone types in an incomplete website name, e.g. cars.berlin, the browser could request that the user further specify the country/state/province for “cars.berlin” to complete the request. Also, subdomains could be included using this approach by simply inserting an additional keyword in between the “cctld” and “.domain”, e.g. ca.joespizza.restaurants.ontario”.

Perhaps this approach isn’t technically feasible or doesn’t make sense. But, you never know until you ask.

Ray