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Regional TLDs To Appeal To Sense Of Identity Say 2013 Domain Pulse Speakers

Domain Pulse 2013 got underway today (Monday) in the Swiss city of Davos, bathed in sunshine and snow, to greet the more than 200 attendees who are attending the annual event for the German speaking domain name community.

The focus of this year’s conference is the looming introduction, finally, of the first new generic Top Level Domains later in 2013 and internet governance. Domain Pulse is co-hosted by SWITCH, nic.at and DENIC, the registries for .CH (Switzerland), .AT (Austria) and .DE (Germany) and this year it is SWITCH’s turn to host the event.

Today speakers that got the conference off and running were representatives of the Swiss Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM), Canton Zurich’s Office of Economic Affairs and Employment, punktwien GmbH and Afilias.

Thomas Schneider from OFCOM stressed that “Swissness” is of key importance for business and tourism in Switzerland.

One way of appealing to potential registrants will be to appeal to a sense of identity for people and businesses living in the city, region or country.

“.swiss is to be made available to the Swiss community, and especially to Swiss institutions and companies,” said Schneider.

Ronald Schwaerzler of .wien meanwhile believes identity is something that should be important in building the TLD in capturing people’s imagination.

Naturally the speakers spoke of their TLDs being successful, but this success may not necessarily come at the detriment of existing TLDs. Rather, as Schneider said of .swiss, the TLD would complement the country’s existing ccTLD .ch.

All of the applicants said they were still in the process of determining the registration policies, what to do with premium domains and how they would promote their TLDs. Part of the reason for this, as is the case of .swiss, is that the applicant, Switzerland’s OFCOM, has not been involved in running a TLD previously and it is a totally new experience.

The Canton of Zurich is also considering reserving some second level domains for third level registrations for .zuerich to allow for future flexibility.