Jeffrey MannThe city of Paris was kind enough to sponsor a reception in the over-the-top beautiful reception halls at the Hotel de Ville as part of the LeWeb Internet startup conference last night. It was offered as part of the effort to support adding a .paris top level Internet domain for web sites related to all things Parisian. When coming in, they ushered me over to a kiosk to sign a petition. I respectfully had to decline.
The .paris proposal is part of a larger project to add regional and city domains led by Paris, Berlin, New York (.nyc) and the Catalan region of Spain. I am all in favour of encouraging international entrepreneurship and promoting Internet activities that aren’t necessarily in Silicon Valley, but I can’t see how this will help. At best, it would be pointless and at worst confusing and even damaging.
These domains could be pointless because ever fewer people go to web sites by typing in the URL in the address field of the browser. They use search engines, RSS feeds, bookmarks, and recommendations from others. Even when people know the URL they often plug it into a browser. Terms like “facebook” “myspace”, “nytimes” and even “google” are among the most popular search spots on Google.com.
It will be confusing for many reasons. How will users know when to go to a more generic domain or to a city-related one? Since many companies will feel obliged to maintain both, these domains will be damaging since it adds complexity and work. How far will it go? If we have .paris will we also soon need .septiemearrondissement or .marais? Will Brooklyn want their own domain to differentiate from .nyc?
City domains could aggravate the sometimes tense relationships between cities and nearby cities and suburbs. A .amsterdam domain might seem natural, but will that force adding .amstelveen, .haarlem and .diemen as well? How will that help people looking for info or providers?
What about the cities that have different spellings? Will it be .geneva .geneve .ginevra .ginebra or .genf as the city is called in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German?
Specific top level domains can focus efforts and make it clear what the site intend to provide. Domains like .mobi .travel and .name make new services possible and help people find what they are looking for. City domains will do neither.
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7 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention .Paris ? Mais pourquoi ? -- Topsy.com December 10, 2009 at 6:41 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeff Mann, Colo_Expert. Colo_Expert said: .Paris ? Mais pourquoi ? http://bit.ly/4Xl8bu [...]
2 Casper Thomsen December 11, 2009 at 4:10 pm
I agree that enduser should be in focus here but let’s assume that you are right and that more and more traffic comes from search engines. If this is correct would it then be easier or more difficult for the search engine to find a relevant site with or without TLDs like .paris? Same question would apply for .fr vs. com…
3 Jeffrey Mann December 12, 2009 at 11:34 am
Casper,
It would be ever so slightly more difficult for a search engine to find a city domain, but trivially so. The engines need to be tweaked, and need to search more sites — but that is what they are good at doing.
My point about how people navigate is not that city or regional domains would make it harder, but that they are irrelevant. If fewer people use URLs, why get so hot and bothered about how they are organized?
4 Casper Thomsen December 12, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Jeffrey
I’m not sure that I agree. I too find it difficult to see value in lots of the new generic TLDs but the geo TLDs make sense in my opinion – just like ccTLDs like .nl or .fr makes sense. Otherwise we should only need one TLD like .world or .all. I am also quite sure that the local baker or hairdresser agree – the chance of getting a relevant local domain name becomes higher when you are not competing with the rest of the country.
I’m not too bothered if traffic comes from direct navigation or via search engines – for me it adds value if search results are more relevant for end users than previously and I find it hard to see how search result could be worse… As it is now a ccTLD will dominate a gTLD in the search engines algorithms – so why wouldn’t/shouldn’t a .paris domain name dominate a .fr domain name?
I also have to questioning your assumption about traffic a bit. I recently read in a presentation by J. Scott Evans from Yahoo and Marc Trachtenberg from Winston and Strawn that 50-65% of traffic comes from direct navigation (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/15204985/Trademark-Protections-in-New-Top-Level-Domains) and being involved in brand protection in China I also know that significant traffic comes from direct navigation out there – primarily because mobile devices are used and because it is still expensive and “an extra step” to go to a search engine. That’s also why they have an option of sending a search via sms and wait for a search/keyword result to arrive on sms before going directly to that domain name.
Of course a lot of this direct navigation comes from bookmarks but anyways – direct navigation account for a higher percentage than we would assume.
When this is said I have to say that there’s also discussions going on about needs for domains at all – for instance here (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=1dd75d14c52c044c&hl=en).
5 Jeffrey Mann December 17, 2009 at 6:55 am
My main concern is that it with the hundreds of thousands of cities in the world, it will become unwieldy and confusing. Your argument about the local hairdresser or baker only works if there is also a .lyon and .marseille and probably even a .neuilly-sur-seine to cover the suburbs. How to handle different spellings, like in the case of Geneva? Does .vancouver refer to a city in BC, Canada or Washington State, USA? There are ways to differentiate these already, with different names without complicating the already overly-complex domain system even more.
6 Mathias Vejerslev March 25, 2010 at 8:22 pm
My concern is that my photo was used for this article without permission or credit, and even altered.
7 Jeffrey Mann March 26, 2010 at 2:12 am
Mathias, I apologize that this happened. I deleted the picture immediately on seeing your comment.
I took this image from a web site which did not restrict reuse rights, honestly believing it was permitted use.
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