TLDH signs another city gTLD – .budapest
Top Level Domain Holdings has been backed by the city of Budapest as the official applicant for the .budapest generic top-level domain.
If the application is approved, TLDH subsidiary Minds + Machines will run the back-end registry and the city will receive a share of the revenue.
TLDH has previously announced deals with local governments for .london, .bayern (Bavaria), .miami and .nrw (North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state).
The company does not list its two announced Indian city gTLD bids – .mumbai (for which city approval may have been withdrawn) and .bangaluru (which appears to be a typo) — on its web site, but a spokesperson indicated that they’re both still active applications.
TLDH also seems to be confirming on its web site that it is in fact applying for .horse, an application I’d long suspected was nothing more than a red herring. Guess I was wrong.
Budapest is of course Hungary’s capital city. Wikipedia says it has about 1.74 million inhabitants, making it Europe’s seventh-largest city.
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How silly. Major .fail ahead.
This decision is probably based on the wide acceptance of .HU, Hungary’s country code. While visiting this city last year, I noticed .that HU was used in almost all of the website urls being advertised on buses, taxis, billboards, benches, windows, etc. DOT-CITY TLDs offer a real alternative to .COM unlike others, i.e., .BIZ, .INFO, .ETC. Looking forward to seeing the full rollout and adoption of city TLDs.
Agree, City TLDs have a great chance for success. We saw a huge influx of registration requests after just a couple of articles when .NYC announced their Neustar deal.
Hate to ask the obvious, but what happens when there are two cities with the same name? Did you know there are 8 cities names Akron (http://www.chacha.com/question/how-many-cities-in-the-usa-are-named-akron) or that there are 54 cities named Miami (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_cities_are_named_Miami) or 9 named Hollywood (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080427133017AAEbL4c).
Bottom line — this whole proposal is a foolish idea, a train crash waiting to happen.
If more than one city applies, they fight in an auction.
If just one city applies, it wins and the others will be blocked from future rounds.
What about the .BUD project?