Welcome to the dotNYC Neighborhood

Courtesy of Tom Lowenhaupt.

On a Wednesday evening in early May, a group of residents from Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn gathered at a meeting hall in the East Village to brainstorm how New York’s more than 300 neighborhoods could exist on the Internet.

They envisioned a network of Web sites, tentatively called “dotNYC Neighborhoods,” that would combine elements of citizen journalism with resources like discussion groups, maps, demographics, calendars, links to civic applications, and comprehensive listings for everything from restaurants to 24-hour-pharmacies. Each neighborhood would get its own URL ending in “.nyc”—astoria.nyc, bushwick.nyc, eastvillage.nyc, and so on—making it as direct and easy as possible to search for and pinpoint information about a given area.

The idea, said Tom Lowenhaupt, a 62-year-old Jackson Heights resident and former community board member who runs a not-for-profit organization called Connecting.nyc, which had convened the meeting, is to put the entire city on the Internet in a way that mirrors its geographic composition.

“It’s never been done before, but New York is the perfect model,” said Mr. Lowenhaupt after the meeting, sipping a cup of hot tea outside a Second Avenue Dunkin’ Donuts.

“It would allow people to coordinate things, to organize,” he continued. “Our vision is to make this an infrastructure upon which social, civic, cultural and economic life will flourish.”

The timing does seem apt considering more and more media companies are starting to emphasize the “hyperlocal.” In fact, some recent startups, like Patch and The New York Times' The Local, which both cover a handful of communities in suburban New Jersey and Brooklyn, offer a similar type of service to what Connecting.nyc has is mind. Outside.in is another.

But perhaps the most noteworthy thing about Connecting.nyc’s proposal is the fact that as far as the Internet’s naming system is concerned, “.nyc” does not exist.

At least not yet.

Next year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit body that charters Web addresses, is expected to open up a process by which groups or individuals could apply for almost any dot-something (the official term is “top-level domain,” or TLD) they wanted. .beer? .mom? .cats? They could be yours! Assuming you have $185,000—that’s the proposed cost for registering a new TLD—and proof of the financial and technical wherewithal to run a domain registry, said Paul Levins, ICANN’s vice president, summarizing the application requirements.

Naturally, a handful of cities have expressed interest in acquiring their namesake TLDs. New York is one of them.

Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who heads the council’s Technology in Government Committee, has been at the helm on this issue.

"I’m extremely supportive of the project and want to see it move forward," she said through a spokesman. "This is the type of project New York City should be looking into to make itself more digitally relevant in the international community."

Council Speaker Christine Quinn is also on board. She announced her support for creating .nyc Web addresses in her Feb. 12 State of the City speech.

And as of last week, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has been assessing the responses it received to an April 15 Request for Information seeking proposals for potential .nyc business models.

“We want to try to canvas the field to see what the best options are for proceeding if we do decide to pursue the .nyc TLD,” said Nick Sbordone, a DoITT spokesman.

It’s possible the city would partner with a third party if it decided to acquire .nyc. Or, at the very least, ICANN’s guidelines stipulate that any group who applies for a city-specific TLD would need said city’s approval.

Connecting.nyc, which Mr. Lowenhaupt formed in 2006, wants that approval.

Here’s the group’s plan in a nutshell: Connecting.nyc successfully acquires the .nyc TLD and becomes the operator of a domain name registry that will sell .nyc Web addresses. (Mr. Lowenhaupt pointed out that aside from neighborhoods, these could be reserved for entities including streets, monuments, civic organization, local businesses, city agencies, etc.) Connecting.nyc then finds a trustee, perhaps a media organization or non-profit, to set up the dotNYC Neighborhoods network and screen applicants seeking to purchase neighborhood domain names. A portion of all domain sales goes to the city.

The question is: Can a small, grassroots organization prove to ICANN that it has the technical experience required to operate a domain registry, let alone raise $185,000 and whatever associated costs would be necessary to purchase .nyc in the first place?

Mr. Lowenhaupt’s answer is that he’s confident Connecting.nyc could partner with a third party that has both money and domain expertise in making the ICANN application. But his competition, an LLC called dotNYC (not to be confused with dotNYC Neighborhoods, of course), is skeptical.

“DotNYC has the ICANN-required experience, the ICANN-required funding and the ICANN-required technical skills. The other groups making noises about .nyc have none of those, and everyone involved knows that,” said Davidson Goldin, an adviser to dotNYC. (Incidentally, there is an East Village resident who claims he already owns .nyc, although ICANN's Mr. Levins said that is "impossible.")

DotNYC is headed by Antony Van Couvering, a Chelsea resident with about 13 years of experience working with domain names and Internet infrastructure, and whose business partner happens to be one of the founders of ICANN. According to his bio, he’s started and managed five top-level country code domains since 1997, including .tm (Turkmenistan) and .as (American Samoa).

DotNYC would make .nyc Web addresses available to any business or individual with a legitimate association with New York City, said Mr. Van Couvering. City government agencies would get their domain names for free. The company would maintain a Manhattan headquarters and take charge of marketing the .nyc domain, as well as developing policies to protect trademarks and ensure .nyc Web addresses were used responsibly. It would give one-third of all domain-sale profits to a city-chosen “Community Partner.” (To put the revenue potential in perspective, in her Feb. 12 speech, Ms. Quinn said that  the sale of .nyc Web addresses at $10 a pop could generate millions of dollars a year.)

Mr. Van Couvering said the domain names would be particularly useful for infrastructure, tourism and entertainment.

“My feeling about it is that with certain important exceptions, like city agencies and official geographical terms, you should be hands off,” he said. “It’s about making it possible for lots of people to do what they need to do.”

Mr. Van Couvering said he’s been pursuing a New York TLD off and on since 2000. Since last fall, he said, dotNYC has had “dozens” of meetings with various city officials, including council members and people in the mayor’s office. To be fair, Mr. Lowenhaupt also said he has met with city officials over the past several years, as well as traveling to a number of ICANN meetings around the world. Ms. Brewer has been in talks with both groups in recent years, her spokesman said.

“I’m extremely confident the city will make the right decision,” said Mr. Van Couvering.

Of course there is no guarantee that the city will end up partnering with or approving either group. Mr. Sbordone, the DoITT spokesman, said a total of six groups responded to the city’s RFI. Aside from Connecting.nyc and dotNYC, those included neuStar Registry Services, Name.Space, VeriSign and INDOM. He also reiterated that it’s not guaranteed the city will opt to pursue .nyc.  It should know how it wants to proceed in another month or so, he said.

In the meantime, Connecting.nyc is preparing for its second meeting about dotNYC Neighborhoods. Mr. Lowenhaupt said the agenda would include how to engage existing local Web resources like blogs and community sites, as well as discussions on “institutional structure." What’s the oversight mechanism? What would they look like and how would they be branded? How much would they cost to set up?

Either way, “New York should lead the world on this,” he said. “We have to get people to see this as important. As their future.”