Geographic Domain Names

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.

I believe that geographic new gTLD extensions are going to be successful. Cities have a built-in audience of businesses and residents who may wish to purchase their business or keyword domain name in their local extension. There are two different approaches to selling their domain names, and one involves limiting sales to entities within the geographic area and the other involves selling domain names to anyone. I am curious to know your thoughts on which is the better approach.

.NYC domain names will only be available to people who have a physical address in New York City. According to the .NYC registry website, “The City of New York desires to have only those individuals or entities having a substantive and lawful connection to the City be permitted to register for .NYC domain names.” On the other hand, .Vegas domain names will be available to anyone who wants to buy them. According to an email I received from the registry team, “.vegas is completely unrestricted, meaning anyone, anywhere in the world may register a web address with a .vegas extension.”

I think there are pros and cons to both approaches. I want to discuss my thoughts on