We try to justify a lot of things in the name of end user(consumer) while on the long run its not the end user that is benefiting significantly, it's rather other folks at the upper layer. If some people believe that going after such territorial TLD is the only way they can succeed and make a difference then they should be ready to defend their case themselves and not be surprised when another entity comes fighting for the same TLD.
Unfortunately when these happen, it puts the poor end user in a confused/helpless state of thinking the url matters more even though all he/she initially cared about is the content on the device referenced by the url.
Ensuring some order/predictability in the names world would seem to be evident of us being in control and not being a servant as you seem to imply.
All from me for now.
Thanks
I am definitely not saying a typical registrant should not be able to register a name with nyc in it but I am saying it provides better order if that is not done at TLD level but at sTLD. So nyc.us would make more sense and provide some form of order.
MM: don’t have time to respond at length but here you are making a policy choice that is fundamental to DNS, and I think it is the _wrong_ choice: you are substituting YOUR top-down judgment for that of the user and supplier. In my view, suppliers get to choose which name they want to offer (barring illegality, of course) and users get to choose which name they get. So if someone wants to offer NYC as a TLD (and pay buckets of money to ICANN as part of that) it’s their choice. And if users are happy with nyc.us instead of .nyc someone is likely to offer it but if they prefer to have .nyc then more power to them. Insofar as its technically feasible, the name space should be our servant – we are not the servants of the name space, meant to conform to its order. We create our own order. That’s what has made the internet successful.