Last hebdomad ’s news that London had applied for a.london top level field name(TLD)—joining a small smattering of other cities and regions around the worldly concern , include .nyc and .paris — raised the question of how a city might define itself online , where the edge and outer boundaries of a city might be when you ’re dawn around amidst all those single and 0s .
That a urban center needs to establish a recognisable , physical identity for itself in the genuine world — whether that ’s through flags and prescribed seals , or through street signs and tourer slogans — is beyond obvious , but it ’s not yet clear how or even why a urban center would require to pursue its individuality online , beyond , say , deploying awell - made municipal website .
https://gizmodo.com/how-seven-cities-designed-surprisingly-great-websites-1442572957
Why become adot - urban center , then , expend $ 185,000 for the initial software fee , with $ 25,000 of annual costs , simply to add on .berlin to certain webpages ? What ’s profit ? These newfangled domains are not always pretty . .hamburg ? .cologne ? At least Barcelona—.bcn — and New York City managed compact abbreviations of their names . .roma , .sydney — these ungainly attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - ons may not add much to the experience of typing URL , but that ’s not their point . They have the impression , instead , of extending — however virtually and metaphorically it may be — geographical markers into cyberspace , redefine the perimeter of the metropolis .
In the outgrowth , a hotel , eatery , legal profession , or bakeshop ; a locksmith , plumber , or architecture office ; a government help firm or even a technical school blog — all can now territorially mark themselves as being from , and based in , a specific metropolis or region . This has both the positive event of capturing local clicks and the negative outcome of seeming far too parochial for others to need to jaw them ( a plumber.nyc website will all but immediately turn a loss appeal in the eyes of anyone even slightly outside the metropolis ) .
More interestingly , though , the parallel idea of creating new top level demesne for non - urban regions is also being promoted as a way to acknowledge — or even to make from whole cloth — an identity that does not inevitably correspond to legally - recognize geographic bounds . AsAfiliassuggests , “ modest cities might care to band together and submit an program for a dot part TLD . For example , the urban center of Wallonia in Belgium might give in a ‘ .walloon ’ to support their hard ethnical and spoken language ties and to highlight commercial enterprise opportunities unique to the region . Or the metropolis of Louisiana ’s Cajun area might consider a ‘ .cajun ’ to prove their one - of - a - kind language , ethnic history and geographic proximity . ” likewise , “ the habitant of the Catalonia realm in Spaincurrently use ‘ .cat ’ to march a shared language , as well as the geographical and ethnical uniqueness in this historical area . ”
Of course , this also enkindle the possibility of creating , say , a .dharavidomain name , the sale of which would financially benefit residents of Mumbai ’s famously underserved informal village . In other words , the strategical use or cut-rate sale of a domain name could almost become a form of digital Polemonium van-bruntiae or net - geography activism . The end would be to give not geopolitical but a kind of cyberpolitical profile to overlooked , struggling , or even irregular regions . .tamil ?
A far more likely hypothesis , however , would be that , as top level domains keep to mutate and blow up in the geezerhood to come , private real estate entrepreneurs loaded enough — or simply gifted with retentive - full term thinking — could preemptively apply for regional area name that correspond to as - yet nonexistent neighborhood or agglomerations . This would be the entrepreneurial use and existence of practical real estate through top grade land name speculation .
The various economical goal of doing so might include , for case , sum up to the ingathering of move businesses into a new development on the metropolis ’s west side for get at some URL that , for whatever reasonableness , has become highly worthy , or even being capable to declare oneself next residents of a building or maturation complex a prestigious email , like joining Amex Black .
And this is not even to observe the obvious fact that existing neighborhoods—.soho , .weho , .soma — could be join by up - and - comers , like .nomad or .nela , right away making them seem more like process , real neighbourhood in which homeowners and business enterprise might require to invest — and , why not , with deep - enough pockets , someone could even fund whole new digital regions with no geographic presence anywhere , like .argleton , or fictionaltrap - townsand sim city simply for the sake of doing so .
In any case , if on-line knowledge domain figure can be used to digitally recognize or even to authenticate a physical , geographical location , what sphere names might you want to see enacted ? .bucktown , .sobe , .stoke . What physical regions deserve practical real estate — and which example seem most absurd ?
Farmland icon courtesyNASA / GSFC / METI / ERSDAC / JAROS , and U.S./JapanASTER Science Team
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