Recent Thunks

Jackson Hts., New York, June 1, 2015 - A few of months back, when preparing our 6 month review of the .nyc TLD’s operation - see here, we grew curious about who had purchased the initial 75,000 .nyc domain names: Was this new resource being allocated in an equitable manner? For example, we wondered if the name purchasers were spread evenly over the city or concentrated in a particular neighborhood or borough. And if they were from a particular social or economic strata.

After considering the options for assessing the situation we concluded that the most effective way to envision the situation would be to plot the home addresses of registrants (aka owners) of .nyc domain names on a map. We’d seen something similar done with housing foreclosures resulting from the 2009 financial crisis. So we requested the WHOIS data from the city.

Over a 10 week period we exchanged a number of emails with city officials requesting the WHOIS data, which details who owns the .nyc domain names. After several back and forths with the city’s data keepers we concluded that it was unlikely that the data would be provided, and on May 27 we filed a data request under the NYS Freedom Of Information Law. We’ll keep you posted.

• Update #1 - On June 5 I received acknowledgement that DoITT had received the FOIL request. As the law states that a response should have been received within 5 business days, we’re facing a lag of a few days. Also, the notification did not provide an estimated date when we might expect to receive the requested data, as required by FOIL. We’re following up.