Those that have read my prior blogs realize that ICANN is in the process of developing the framework for three types of new TLDs (excluding IDNTLDs): 1) corporate TLDs (e.g. www.domain.msn); 2) generic TLDs (e.g. www.domain.cars); and 3) city TLDs (www.domain.paris). Of the three new TLDs, the least contentious is probably city TLDs, however, one of the main issues facing ICANN is allocating a city TLD when the name of a particular city appears in many parts of the world, e.g. Paris, France; Paris, Tennessee; Paris, Texas; Paris, IL, etc. One solution proposed by dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG, which is seeking to acquire Dot-Berlin, is to create a consortium between all the cities in the world that have the same name and want to use the Dot-City TLD. On the surface, that solution seems very egalitarian, but, not very practical.

Instead, we should ask ourselves if we can address this issue from another direction, e.g. from the left side of the url. Do we really need to have the "WWW" when we are attempting to develop local TLDs? If not, the answer is very simple. We can simply replace the "WWW" with the country's ccTLD (e.g. "us" for the United States, "fr" for France, "de" for Germany, etc.), and, where a particular country (e.g. U.S.A.) has the same city name in various states/provinces, we can resolve that issue as well by inserting another identifier after the ccTLD (e.g. "us.il", "us.tx", "us.tn", etc.).

Let's say we want to allocate Dot-Paris, however, we know of three cities in the United States and one in France that have a City of Paris. For France, we could create "fr.domain.paris". In the United States, we could use 'us.tx.domain.paris", "us.il.domain.paris", and "us.tn.domain.paris". For Dot-Berlin, the TLD in Germany would look like "de.domain.berlin" whereas in the United States is would look like "us.nj.domain.berlin". This solution allocates Dot-City domains by using an existing ccTLD list already in use for many years by ICANN. In addition, many users of the Internet are already aware of this ccTLD naming convention, e.g. they are already up the learning curve regarding the ccTLDs. Therefore to place the ccTLD in place of the "WWW" to visit the relevant Dot-City TLD would not translate into a significant learning curve issue. Provided below are examples of what this naming convention would look like:

1) fr.domain.paris
2) us.tx.domain.paris
3) us.il.domain.paris
4) us.tn.domain.paris
5) de.domain.berlin
6) us.nj.domain.berlin
7) us.mi.domain.berlin

This solution offers another advantage as well, e.g. greater precision on searches at the country level and city level. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. could modify their search engines such that individuals looking for cars in Germany would have the search engine check only for that keyword in "de.domain.berlin", "de.domain.munich", "de.domain.frankfurt", etc. Or, if the individual wants more precision, the search engine could search for that keyword in a particular city, e.g. cars in "de.domain.berlin". Also, if someone types in "cars.berlin" and leaves out the "ccTLD" in the beginning of the url, the browser could prompt the user to narrow their search to the country level or country/state level in which the Dot-City websites exist. Finally, if someone wants to create subdomains, they could expand the url in the middle, e.g. us.subdomain.domain.city or us.tx.joescars.dealerships.paris.

In essence, the ccTLD at the beginning of the url can represent a particular Country Wide Web ("CWW") just as effectively as the "WWW" represents the World Wide Web. Also, by having both a CWW at the beginning of the url and a Dot-TLD at the end of the url, we are able to pinpoint domains within a particular country/city or country/state/city which is something that is missing under the current url naming convention. There's no reason why we cannot have TLDs based on the WWW convention that serve a global need and TLDs based on the CWW convention that serve a local need. The Internet should be able to accomodate both and, no doubt, there is a need for both. We can either simplify the url naming convention process, or place more reliance on algorithms within search engines to effectively/efficiently navigate the Internet. This approach represents a win-win solution for both countries, states, cities, search engines, etc., in that we can allocate identical City-TLDs to multiple cities all over the world while enhancing the results of our searches within a particular country/city or country/state/city of interest.

With that said, I've submitted this idea to ICANN for its next meeting in Mexico City, Mexico.