18(a) Describe the mission/purpose of your proposed gTLD

Prototypical answer:

“The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.”
-Margaret Mead-

We expect great things from our great cities. Bustling metropolis with fabulous places to dine, museums to visit history, architectural wonders, places of commerce, musical venues, theater, gathering places and great parks, are just some of our expectations. Or equally important, small cities with an affinity of specialized purpose, like those known for their specialized goods or services, or quality of living, or artists and academics. Deeper and more meaningful though are the identities we attach to these cities and that extend onto ourselves and our endeavours. It is common for a person to express their city as an extension of expected behavior or characteristic. Just by saying one is from London, Moscow, Paris, Mumbai, New York, Tokyo, we begin to imagine those cities and for what they are known best.

Capturing this sense of place and associated identity allows us to associate many things with the city.. In the Internet, in particular, a Top Level Domain with a themed approach carries a sense of purpose even as a generic, open TLD through its semantic meaning. Providing a TLD for every single city is a technical possibility, but perhaps not economically viable or pragmatic. We seek to allow the bold and innovative to step forward and use city themed registrations in viable and creative ways.

The mission⁄purpose of .city is to facilitate web services creating a virtual world around a defined name space that represents a real world – your city. The .city extension is intended to provide the registrant an immediately recognized domain name that tells end-users that the registrant’s products, services or information, can be found in or associated with a particular city. The .city extension is a generic, global top-level domain that will be offered without restrictions. It is a TLD string with empirical meaning that we believe potential registrants will understand and see the opportunities for geographic identification through their registrations. Each registrant will be responsible for developing their unique value proposition based upon their products, services or information in the market defined by their .city registration.

We chose 153 diverse cities from around the world and found that there exist as many as 2.5 million domain names, that carry one of these city names as an integral part of the domain name. This corresponds to a substantial 1.93% of all gtld domain names, and demonstrates the popularity and need for registrants to associate their web presence to a city name.

The demand largely comes from various small localized shops and service providers that specialize in serving a specific city. A .city domain name will better classify their scope as ʹwithin the boundires of a specific cityʹ. (eg: ʹQuick Cabsʹ in London could buy ʹquickcabslondon.cityʹ; ʹJB Mallʹ in Dubai could get jbmalldubai.city).

The mission⁄purpose for .city is as follows –

1.1 ENHANCE SEARCHABILITY AND RECOGNITION

To create a namespace that enables local business operators to easily distinguish themselves from countless others. It enables them to call out that they belong to a city, and are a part of its eco-system. This benefits the Registrants as well as the end users. When an end user is in the need of localized support; he will be able to quickly spot local operators from others.

1.2 CREATE A CLEANER INTERNET SPACE

To create a cleaner internet experience for end users by implementing pioneering registration policies, content and usage policies, and abuse mitigation processes.

1.3 CREATE A STABLE AND RESILIENT INTERNET SPACE

To deliver a stable and resilient internet experience to registrants and end-users by going above and beyond the ICANN mandated SLAs and delivering 100% resolution uptime

This completes our response to Q18(a).

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