New York City still exploring options for .nyc domain name.
New York City’s Law Department responded to the second draft of the new top level domain name guidebook, raising concerns to a number of points including the cost of applying for and running a new top level domain. One commentor on the story asked if New York had a deal with a third party in which the city wouldn’t incur any out-of-pocket costs.
The answer is no. New York City is in the very early stages of exploring a .nyc top level domain name. It has not made any determination if it will eventually launch .nyc, and has not selected a business partner to go to market with.
Two organizations have been pushing the idea — connecting.nyc and dotNYC, but neither has any sort of contractual relationship with the city, according to city representatives. Representatives of the two organizations were not immediately available to comment on their status and involvement with .nyc.
The city plans to release a Request for Information (RFI) soon, and this will include guidelines for what it is seeking. In other words, if you are interested in teaming up with the city to launch .nyc, the playing field is wide open.
Not many folks are aware that all of the seed money for dot-Asia came from Afilias:
http://www.webcitation.org/5fuGn3SYT
“Q7. Where did the seed money for DotAsia Organisation come from?
….Initial capital is obtained in the form of a zero-interest
unsecured loan from Afilias……the repayment terms are favourable to DotAsia in that it is risk free and on a per-domain-year basis….this greatly reduces the financial risk for DotAsia and is an important element, among other technical and operational considerations for choosing Afilias to be the back-end registry services provider.
Q26. Has Afilias provided any donation or subsidy to DotAsia?
….The loan is a zero-interest unsecured loan to DotAsia and with repayment terms based on a per-domain-year schedule, after DotAsia opens its registration operations. The structure of the loan, affords the organisation and our members virtually no financial burden on the
start-up of the registry.
Q27 Why was Afilias chosen as the back-end registry services provider?
….The financial terms for the ongoing registry services as well as the loan for start-up activities of DotAsia Organisation proposed by Afilias is highly favourable and risk free, based entirely on a per-domain-year structure. There would be no one-time set-up cost to DotAsia so the organisation would have very little financial burden on
the capital expenses part during the start-up period. In other words, it would be a risk sharing model which would encourage both parties to do a better job.”
So, these registry operators come to a “community” and basically borrow their “community credentials” to have a friendly face for their proposed gTLD, and in exchange that “community” gets a no-risk proposition. When you have nothing to lose, and something to gain, of course you are going to say “Yes, we support XYZ.”