The form and function of city name spaces
One answer of course is the form is that of Verisign's .com, and the function is to make its operator money. Another answer is that the form is that of NeuStar's city.county.state.us taxa, and the function is to flatten that tree to a .com-like .us in order to ... make its operator money. Yet another answer is that the form is that of Afilias' purchase of India, and the function is to flatten a country to a .com-like .in in order to ... make its operator money.
Each of these are predicated on the $6/yr, first-come-first-serve model, which naturally includes the typo-squatting and ad sense "features", and criminal economic models, spam, phish, and so on, and the major economic engine, the buyer who drives all other buyers, are trademark portfolio managers, who pay much, much more than six-dollars-and-change.
Note Well: <CORE-CTO-HAT="on">
We have another answer. We're guided by Jon Postel's sense of the DNS community in the mid-90's published as RFC 1591 Domain Name System Structure and Delegation, that the operators of the registry for a delegated domain are trustees for the delegated domain, and have a duty to serve the community.Note Well: <CORE-CTO-HAT="off">Suppose we intend to submit a response to the Request for Information published April 15th by the Department of Information Telecommunications and Technology of the City of New York concerning a top-level domain -- .nyc
Of course we have just this intent. We started working on a Berlin project shortly after getting the first linguistic and cultural application approved for Catalan, and three years ago we started working on a Barcelona project, and two years ago we started working on a Paris project. In each we have proposed, and the local governments have accepted, that the basic purpose is to serve the needs of "civil society".
We will submit an application to operate a registry for New York to ICANN, when ever ICANN deigns to accept applications, as will, in all likelihood, Verisign, NeuStar and Afilias.
So the question is, what is the form and function that New Yorkers want for .nyc?
I'll be writing about policy issues specific to cities as top-level domains, and in honor of James Blish who wrote Cities in Flight, which I was fortunate to read in Analog, I've selected that work to be the name of this category.