I’m not sure why this idea would result in a “mess” if each of the respective countries that you’ve listed above actually have a city named “London”. The ccTLD at the beginning of the url signifies the country in which the city of “London” exists, and “casino” speaks for itself. If a city of “London” doesn’t exist in such countries, no one would be able to register such third level city domains since this process would be regulated by ICANN and participating cities throughout the world that share the same name.

ICANN would have to regulate this approach by creating an authorized list of third level city domains. That authorized list would be created between ICANN and participating cities located throughout the world that share the same name and want to have a third level city domain. The ccTLD at the beginning of the url would allow ICANN to allocate “.London” to cities throughout the world that share that name. The ccTLD at the beginning of the url would also signify to the Internet community the country of origin for the third level city domain, e.g. uk.domain.london, ca.domain.london, etc. If “London” doesn’t exist in the countries you’ve cited above, ICANN would not allow you to register en.domain.london, de.domain.london, cz.domain.london, es.domain.london. With that said, there would certainly be an issue with this methodology if you tried searching for http://www.casino.london or casino.london in your Internet browser. Don’t know how this issue would be resolved. The concept is certainly not bullet proof.

Thanks for the response. Yes, I was aware that what I was proposing for City-TLDs was essentially third level domains and that this is now possible with existing TLDs. Perhaps the City-TLDs could be owned/operated by a consortium of cities that share the same name and that only third-level domains could be sold on the City-TLDs, e.g. fr.domain.paris, us.domain.paris, de.domain.berlin, us.domain.berlin, etc. This would solve the allocation problem between cities around the world that share the same name.

Ray Marshall

Question: Why was ICANN staff researching George Kirikos’ political views on President Barack Obama? (as was verified by Apache webserver referrer logs) Does ICANN keep a dossier on every community participant?

ICANN resplied with: “Information regarding any such search has not been provided to ICANN. ICANN does not contract for, have access to, or maintain a dossier on any community participant, including on their political views.”

Since ICANN denies receiving such information, but it was posted to the ICANN GA mailing list on January 9, 2009:

http://www.webcitation.org/5fwEYlXUI

with the actual Apache webserver logs which contained IP address and date/timestamp details. That would allow ICANN to determine who was responsible.