http://t.co/GiQwij3SjX pic.twitter.com/YltbQjFxkm
— Norm Ritchie (@normritchie) June 3, 2014
I thought you might want to see this photo of the Eiffel Tower in Paris that was taken this evening. As you can clearly see, there is advertisement for the Bienvenue.Paris website. For those who don’t speak French, bienvenue means “welcome.” Paris is one of my favorite cities in Europe, and in my opinion, having a large advertisement like this on the Eiffel Tower is great exposure for the .Paris domain name registry.
The .Paris gTLD domain extension is backed by Ville de Paris, the City of Paris, France. At the end of 2013, the City of Paris announced that it was looking for proposals for the first entities to utilize .Paris domain names. I would guess that this is one of those domain names, but I don’t know for certain. You can learn more about .Paris via 101Domain, and you can learn more about the .Paris Pioneer Program on InternetNews.ME.
It is unclear to me who owns the domain name. The Whois record lists the Registrant Name as Ville de Paris and the Registrant Organization as Hotel de Ville.
Thanks to Norm Ritchie for sharing this photo via Twitter, and thanks to Michele Neylon of Blacknight Solutions for making me aware of its existence.
Elliot,
the owner of Bienvenue.Paris is the city of Paris (“Ville de Paris” in French), the Paris municipality.
“Hôtel de Ville” is the name of the longstanding headquarters of the Paris municipality.
The name Hôtel de Ville comes from the historical building housing the city’s local administration. 🙂
Thank you for clarifying that for me!
The official launch party of the DotParis will be tonight on the Eiffel tower. This was the test done yesterday evening for tongight party 😉
I wish I got an invitation to that party… J’aime Paris!