Good News Update: See the “Mapping the Neighborhood” bike event on Mothers Day.
Bad News Update: There’s zero transparency by city hall when it comes to the .nyc contract. What’s going on?
Cities were networking centers for 10,000 years before the Internet was imagined. The more robust the network the greater the city.
The mid-1990′s saw an uninvited Internet reconfigure our city’s small business, government, civic, neighborhood, and family networks – sometimes for the better, other times for the worse.
In 2012 the .nyc TLD arrives – like .com and .org, but just for New York – empowering us to re-imagine a key feature of the Internet. Its arrival provides the opportunity to mold the technology to our needs, to create a more responsive and potent Internet, one that addresses the full breadth of our needs. For example, we can
- organize our online resources into a digital grid, like our ancestors did 200 years ago when they created Manhattan’s street grid,
- create local networks – Harlem.nyc, ParkSlope.nyc, Astoria.nyc…,
- create a trusted TLD (and city), that provides global access to our ideas, services, and products,
- create intuitive Net spaces for traditional organizations, e.g., GreenwichVillageAssociation.nyc,
- create good local jobs and keep Internet revenue in the city by growing local Internet service businesses.
What We Stand For
Our effort began in 2001 with an Internet Empowerment Resolution and took a big step forward in 2009 when city hall supported the TLDs acquisition. But some there argue for its operation under the Standard Model, not as the public interest TLD called for in that 2001 Resolution.
- Standard Model – name sales indicate success – the .com TLD approach.
- Community Model which measures success in terms of quality of life improvements.
So with the prospect of our digital diaspora coming to an end – see countdown to submission - the question as to whether New Yorkers will have long term access to names that enable them to set up a business, civic, or personal website using good .nyc names remains in question. Will our digital infrastructure be sold off in a fire sale? Will the world be able to find us? And most important, will be be empowered to find one another in the coming digital era?
Our Work Isn’t Finished
City Hall is operating behind closed doors on this, and missing the advantages that transparency and public engagement provide. Prudence requires that we presume it is leaning toward the Standard Model, so we need to convince Mayor Bloomberg that .nyc is infrastructure that best serves if developed in the public interest. And with ICANN having released its New TLD Application Guidebook without considering the special needs of cities, the responsibility falls on New Yorkers to make sure the public interest is served.
What We Need
This is a massive change. We need to set City Hall in the right direction, then we need thousands of New Yorkers to contribute their time and talent to make sure it’s done right. Build your skills while you build our city’s network. See our CARPA wiki page for the types of insight and skills needed.
Click around our wiki and blog to learn about our mission, the advantages .nyc brings, the acquisition campaign, our governance and domain name allocation plans, and a lot more. Then email us to get started creating a greater New York.
Who would you like to connect with?
