Recent Thunks

June 26, 2015, Buenos Aires - Over the past few months we’ve grown increasingly distressed over the city’s failure to initiate a new governance process for the .nyc TLD. As we’ve mentioned previously, the city’s residents and businesses lost their say in planning our city’s TLD when the .NYC Advisory Board ceased operating last December.

While at the recent ICANN conference in Buenos Aires we learned that New York is not alone in its disregard for stakeholder engagement. Indeed, we were unable to find a city-TLD that respected the multistakeholder model in their TLD’s planning, design, and development.

Responding to the flawed governance process for city TLDs,  Connecting.nyc Inc.’s Thomas Lowenhaupt offered the following comment to the ICANN’s Broad of Directors at its June 25 Public Forum in Buenos Aires:

My name is Thomas Lowenhaupt. I live in New York City, and I’d like to speak about the public interest and city-TLDs.

On April 19th, 2001, a resolution I introduced was approved by a local governance body in New York City. Entitled “The Internet Empowerment Resolution,” it called for the development of the .NYC TLD as a public interest resource.

Now, a little over 15 years later, .NYC is operating with close to 80,000 names issued. One might imagine that I’d be standing before you filled with delight and joy. But the opposite is true.

In New York City, in all these years, there has not been a meaningful public hearing about our city’s TLD.

We’re not alone in that regard. This past Sunday at a geo-TLD meeting held right down the hall, I asked the representative from .PARIS about public engagement in developing its name allocation plan. She responded that there have not been any public meetings.

How might we improve this situation and insert the public interest?

I believe an effective process is before us, the multistakeholder model.

When ICANN again begins accepting applications for cities, a fundamental requirement of the process should be that all stakeholder groups have had a meaningful opportunity to participate in a consensus-based planning process. A meaningful opportunity to participate in a consensus-based planning processes. Any application for a city TLD should detail how it embodies the informed consent of all stakeholders. Informed consent.

Such a plan would define the public interest.

In support of this statement, over the past months we’ve advanced the concept of “informed consent” into the ICANN’s policy development processes. And in the coming years we’ll advocate for bottom up, multistakeholder governance by cities applying for their TLDs, and for public engagement in their ongoing operation. (Creative Commons photo courtesy of ICANN)